Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Dabi cannot believe that he’s going to be stuck with this shit for a whole week. He spent a grand total of seven minutes bullying Spinner into doing the fucking dishes—the least the lizard can do, after Dabi spent an hour helping Fuyumi cook—and this is what he comes back to?

“I could’ve gone with blue,” Fuyumi tells him, amused. She taps one of her nails lightly, testing how dry the black nail polish is. “It would have matched your eyes.”

“Oooh, that would have been so pretty,” Toga chirps. She’s painting the nails on Fuyumi’s other hand, which is resting on the arm of the couch with nothing to guard from drips, because everyone around here was raised in a barn, apparently. Dabi expected better from Fuyumi, at the very least.

Though Fuyumi has looked a lot calmer since eating dinner and figuring out where Hawks actually stands. Allowing Toga near her so casually might be a good sign, but Dabi wishes it didn’t come at the expense of his goddamn dignity. It’ll come off, uh-huh, sure, but what is he supposed to do about the pictures?

Well. At least, with Fuyumi settled in, Dabi has time to worry about the more regular upkeep—and if the thing with the eye drops was any indication, that means he’s going to have to go over every little thing his dumpster fire of a body needs to continue functioning. Like—

“Hey, Ihai. Why are you missing a staple in your face?” My face, he means. What the fuck did you do to my staples.

Fuyumi pokes herself in the cheek, cautious of her nail polish. “I keep popping them out by accident. I’m not used to having my expressions restricted like this. I’ve put one or two back in, but I lost the one that’s supposed to go over here, and there was one that I stepped on while looking for it that was supposed to go in my wrist.”

“Why didn’t you put a new one in?”

Fuyumi blows on her nails and tests them again. “I’m pretty sure you don’t want me trying to schedule a doctor’s appointment for you,” Fuyumi says dryly.

“…Doctor’s appointment?”

Fuyumi stares at him just as blankly as he’s staring back at her. “You—do you put these staples in yourself?”

“Did you not see the staple gun in my stuff?”

Fuyumi startles so bad that Toga almost drops the bottle of nail polish. “I’m sorry, the what?”

Dabi rolls his eyes. The League doesn’t freak out like this. Hell, he bets Natsuo wouldn’t freak out either—which might not be a fair comparison, what with the difference in their college majors, but still. “I’ll just go get it.”

Dabi tromps up the stairs, opens the door to his room, and realizes he hasn’t been up here since this morning. That feels like a fucking age ago, honestly, despite being less than a day, but it doesn’t look disturbed. Apparently whatever clearning whirlwind Fuyumi swept through the house avoided anyone’s personal space.

He digs the staple gun out of its case, makes sure it’s empty, and then loads it with a couple of staples straight from the sterilized package. He should get some more next time he steals some blood from a hospital for Toga; he’s pretty good about taking care of his skin, but Fuyumi doesn’t have the practice he does, and two missing staples in six hours is not an encouraging sign.

When he walks back into the living room, Fuyumi gapes at him and the staple gun he’s holding, because apparently she wants to pop another staple right this second just to prove a point. “Okay, I—I definitely thought you were joking. You can’t tell me that’s sanitary.”

“It’s literally a surgical staple gun. You know, a gun. For surgical staples. It’s the most sanitary thing you’re going to find in this house for arts and crafts.”

“Please don’t call stapling your skin together ‘arts and crafts,’” Fuyumi says faintly.

“C’mon, either the staples are artsy and part of the fuckin’ aesthetic, or you have to admit they’re practical.”

“I didn’t say you were wrong, I just said please don’t call it that—oh no you stop right there.” Fuyumi straightens up and holds out a hand like a stop sign. Her other hand clutches at the arm of the couch; Toga just bends over and twists a little to keep painting her pinky nail, the tip of her tongue poking out of her mouth.

Dabi took one step. He’s still a solid six feet away. “Are you serious?”

“Yes, I’m serious! You are not getting near my face with that thing.” She points severely at the staple gun.

“You’re missing staples, and you need new ones.”

“Not from a staple gun.”

“How exactly do you think you’re supposed to put staples in the first time? And they get wiggly if you don’t change where they are every once in a while anyway.”

“I don’t want to know that.”

“You have to know that, dammit—“ Dabi gives up on trying to calm her down and just marches forward. Fuyumi scrambles off of the couch to get away from him. Compress takes his feet off the coffee table to let her pass and then puts them back before Dabi can get past. Dabi sends him a baleful glare, but Compress just watches him from behind his happy mask, practically glowing with smug amusement.

“I was done, anyway,” Toga informs Dabi earnestly, as if he gives a shit whether she painted all of Fuyumi’s nails perfectly. She screws the cap onto the bottle and offers it to him. “Do you want me to paint your nails too?”

“Compress, move your fucking legs before I break them. Ihai, sit your ass down.”

“Absolutely not!” Fuyumi says. Compress leans forward to grab a sesame cookie from the plate next to his feet and pointedly does not remove himself from Dabi’s path. “You’re not stapling me in the face. With a—a staple gun!”

“I am, actually. I am definitely going to do that.”

Dabi starts moving around the coffee table and Fuyumi backs right the hell up, firmly placing both the coffee table and the couch between them. “Dabi, I realize how tasteless it is to say this, but I need you to understand that if you come any closer to me with that thing I am setting you on fire.”

Shigaraki, eyes up practically in his hairline, whistles long and low. “Vicious. You only threatened Hawks with his feathers didn’t you?”

“Hawk’s feathers will grow back and Dabi is currently fireproof. But that thing?” She points at the staple gun, halfway to hysterical again after all the work Dabi’d put into calming her down. “That thing will melt. Do not test me on this.”

Dabi almost wants to push her, but if she’s threatening something like that, she’s genuinely freaked out enough that she might actually do it. Dabi might be fine, technically, but getting set on fire when he can’t control it is literally the last thing he wants to do—with his luck, he’ll instinctively freeze himself, and then he’s really fucked. He stops where he is and puts his hands on his hips. “You’re going to give me a fucking infection if you let the grafts stay open like that,” he snaps.

That, at least, seems to break through her immediate repulsion. Fuyumi folds her arms tightly and scowls at him, shoulders hunched. “But—a staple gun?”

“It’s not that scary.” Dabi waggles the gun to show it off—it’s barely bigger than his hand is, with a simple squeeze mechanism. “I’ll get the other stuff I need for this, and then yes: staple gun.”

He doesn’t trust her not to try to melt the staple gun if he leaves it with her for more than about three seconds, so he takes it with him to the bathroom down the hall. He just needs—

Dabi stares blankly at the medicine cabinet. “Who the hell fucked around with the medicine cabinet?”

“You’re welcome!” Fuyumi calls waspishly. “It’s all organized by main effect and sketchiness.”

Sketchiness? Dabi eyes the top row of the cabinet, which is composed solely of pill bottles with handwritten labels taped on crookedly. Okay, actually, ‘sketchiness’ is probably a fair metric. As for main effect… he grabs a mild painkiller out of the cabinet, just in case Fuyumi needs it. Then down to the cupboard under the sink, for a rag and the antiseptic.

The pile of rags is gone. “Where the hell is—wait, never mind.“ There’s a stack of folded rags next to a little laundry basket tucked into the back. Okay, what the hell. He grabs the first one off the top and reaches for the first aid kit to grab the antiseptic—and stares. “How the hell did you get the blood off of the first aid kit?”

“Hydrogen peroxide and a metric ton of elbow grease!”

Fair enough. Dabi shrugs and brings his spoils back to the living room, where Fuyumi is still pouting like a child about to get a shot. “Sit down, you big baby, it’s like getting your ears pierced.”

“I didn’t like getting my ears pierced,” Fuyumi mutters rebelliously. “Now I’m getting stabbed twice. Wait, no, four times. Are you really sure you have to—?”

Dabi rolls his eyes and marches over just to take her arm so he can drag her—gently—to the couch to make her sit down. “I do this shit all the time, it’s fine.” He takes great pleasure in kicking Compress in the knee pointedly to get him to move, which Compress does with the put-upon dignity he’s only able to maintain because he’s a total fucking fake. Asshole.

“Yes, well, you also frequently attack school children, so excuse me if I don’t look to you as a role model.”

“Yeah, yeah, shut up,” Dabi grumbles, kneeling on the seat next to her. Fuyumi leans away, but he grabs her shoulder and pulls her back. “Stay still and just look straight ahead.”

“Oh god. Oh god I can’t believe you—“

“Stop talking,” Dabi says exasperatedly. “Clench your jaw, don’t move, and don’t set anything on fire.”

Fuyumi snaps her mouth shut so fast it has to be painful. Dabi puts one hand on the opposite side of her head to keep her steady as he sets the staple gun against her cheek and fires it in.

“Shoot, that hurt.”

“Did you really just say ‘shoot’?” Dabi asks her skeptically.

“Some of us don’t sound like sailors every time we stub our toes, Dabi.” Fuyumi pokes gingerly at the new staple, wincing. “Do you have to do the other one now?”

“In a minute.” Dabi douses the rag in antiseptic before batting her hand away from her face and replacing it with the rag. It’s a good thing he put his hands on both sides of her head again, because she jerks at the undoubtably vicious sting.

“Son of a bitch!”

“Sure am,” Dabi says blithely.

Fuyumi smacks him in the leg. “Excuse you, that was uncalled for.”

“Do you really think I mean mom?”

Fuyumi pauses. Then she sighs, shoulders sagging. “Okay, that’s fair.”

Toga leans over to put her hand to Shigaraki’s ear and stage whispers, “I told you he has daddy issues!”

“Yeah, none of us were disagreeing with you,” Shigaraki says at his normal volume.

Dabi shoots them both blistering glares.

Freshly stapled together, Fuyumi lets Himiko fix up the nails on her right hand, since they got a little messed up while she was trying to dodge the staple gun. The black isn’t bad, even if she would have preferred blue—but she wants Dabi annoyed, not uncomfortable. Black at least matches his aesthetic, and he might deny it, but Fuyumi knows she saw an interested glint in his eye when Himiko had brought it up during dinner.

They’re going to need to talk about boundaries soon, though, if they’re going to be stuck in the wrong bodies for the next week. At least tomorrow’s Sunday, so Fuyumi has some leeway before she needs to remind Dabi that her life can’t actually handle the sudden absence with absolutely zero explanation.

“Ooh, I think I messed up your cuticles,” Himiko fusses. “Hang on!” She pulls a knife out of a pocket—a pocket, not a sheath. Is that safe?

The knife gets closer to her fingers and Fuyumi belatedly thinks to ask: is she safe? She throws a sharp glance at Dabi, but he just rolls his eyes at them both. Himiko does seem a little knife-happy, but she’s not allowed to stab anyone—

And Himiko is delicately scraping at her cuticles with the very tip of the knife. Her tongue is poked out in concentration again, which is adorable, despite the fact that this all looks like the start of an edgy torture scene in one of those R-rated villain flicks Natsuo used to try to convince her to help him sneak into.

Fuyumi should probably be freaking out over something like this, but she’s tired; she just stays very still as Himiko fixes her cuticles and sticks the knife back into her pocket. Her weirdness meter is going to be completely broken by the time she can actually go home, she can tell already.

Fuyumi yawns, and raises a hand to cover it. She tries not to open her mouth too far, conscious of the ache of the new staple in her cheek, but she sees Dabi’s eyes on her almost immediately.

“You know what? It’d been a long fucking day, and we still have to figure out logistics,” Dabi decides. “Toga, you better be done.”

Himiko pouts, still holding Fuyumi’s hand. “But I want to spent time with Ihai, she’s so nice.”

Fuyumi is flattered; Dabi just looks unimpressed. “And Ihai needs to spend time horizontal, you gremlin. She’s had to deal with all of you for hours now and she didn’t even sign up for that shit. Ihai, c’mon, up.”

Sleep sounds nice. Quiet space without other people and unexpected revelations and confusing circumstances sounds even nicer. “Right, yes.” She slowly stands, pauses, and puts a hand on Himiko’s head with a smile. It’s weird being so much taller than her, but Fuyumi kind of likes it. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

Himiko hugs her around the middle, lightning quick. “Good night, Ihai!”

Fuyumi follows Dabi up the stairs and down the hallway. She’d cleaned the bathroom, earlier, but she hadn’t dared try to explore the rooms. There’s no placards or personalization visible on any of the doors, but Dabi opens the second one on the left. It’s relatively neat, but not sterile. Fuyumi doesn’t see any personal affects—unless the staple gun still on his desk next to his laptop counts as a personal affect—and the walls are bare, but what color scheme exists in the furniture and bed linens is all dark blues, browns, and blacks.

She’s so focused on the room that the bundle of clothing Dabi tosses to her almost hits her into the face. She fumbles a little, but catches them before they hit the floor. Pajamas. Not any of hers—Dabi is pulling a pair out of a backpack she recognizes from her closet, but it makes sense they have to switch—

Fuyumi’s brain screeches to a stop. “We have to change.”

Dabi gives her an irritated look. He’s taken his mask off, finally, now that they’re in the privacy of his room, and honestly it just makes the whole situation feel stranger. “Yeah. That’s why I gave you pajamas, you’ll ruin my jeans if you sleep in them.”

“…We have to change while wearing each other.”

Dabi closes his eyes, pained. “For fuck’s sake, don’t say it like that, it sounds weird. And yeah, no shit, that’s because we’re stuck in each other.”

“That sounds even weirder,” Fuyumi snaps. She narrows her eyes. “Wait. I wasn’t wearing any of that this morning—“

“And it took you two hours to notice?” Dabi demands. “Yes, I had to change. Yes, it’s weird, but get a grip, we’re siblings. Imagine how much weirder this would be if we weren’t.”

Fuyumi has to admit he has a point there. She can’t imagine what it would be like if she’d swapped bodies with someone like Hawks. “Yes, but we haven’t shared a bath since we were about five years old, so forgive me if I find myself a little unsettled with this.”

“Just take a damn shower and don’t rip out any more staples.”

Fuyumi takes a shower, checks the staples—there are way too many staples—and gets dressed. The second she’s wearing the pajamas, she decides that the last half hour didn’t happen and no one on earth will be able to force her to admit otherwise.

Dabi showers after her, and when he comes back to the room he locks himself in the walk-in closet to change. Fuyumi is still musing over how the hell modesty is supposed to work when you aren’t the person in your body when she hears two swift bangs and a gamut of swearing from the closet.

“Yumi, what the fuck is wrong with this death trap?”

Aw, did he just call her Yumi? She’s missed hearing him use her name, and the shortened version especially. The rest of that statement is more concerning, however, so she drifts over to the closet door. “Death trap?” She hears another thump, this one vibrating the door about level with her shoulder. Is he trying to give her a concussion?

Dabi’s voice is defeated. “…I don’t know how to put on a bra.”

Fuyumi processes that. Then she looks up at the ceiling and resists the urge to bang her own head against the door. “It’s ten p.m., you idiot.”

“What?”

“Dabi, you just called it a death trap, do you think women sleep in those things?”

Another thump against the door. “How the fuck would I know something like that?”

Fuyumi has no words. None at all. Wait—yes she does. “If I didn’t already know you were gay,” she says, trying not to laugh, “I’d be a little concerned for the state of your sex life.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

She rolls her eyes. No creativity. “Are you embarrassed that I know you’re gay? Because believe me, it was pretty obvious when you were fourteen, and even if it wasn’t, dinner tonight was kind of a clue.”

“No, shut up so I can concentrate, I swear this thing is fighting me.”

Fuyumi’s eyebrows tick upward. “I… will leave you to that, then.”

“Where am I supposed to sleep?” Fuyumi asks, once Dabi as finally changed into pajamas that aren’t trying to kill him.

“There’s space for us both in my bed, I guess,” Dabi says, eyeing his mattress. “I don’t have a spare futon or anything, and I doubt you want to risk sleeping on the couch, since half the house is still awake. Not a lot of early risers here.”

Fuyumi starts to nod, but stops and squints suspiciously at the mattress. “…Jumping off of our recent discussion about your disaster gay energy—“

“That was not a conversation we had.”

“—if you’ve slept with Hawks in that bed, I’m sleeping on the floor.”

Dabi doesn’t speak for a concerningly long time. “That’s… fair,” he says slowly. “But considering that I’m currently the one wearing your body, which way would it actually be less weird to—“

“Stop,” Fuyumi says abruptly. “Just… stop talking.”

They stand there in silent for a moment.

“…At least tell me you changed the sheets.”

“Of course I changed the sheets, what kind of animal do you take me for?”

Fuyumi throws up her hands. “I spent three hours cleaning today, and I have no faith left in any of you. But if you’re keeping your room… in order… you know what? This conversation is over, and it didn’t happen, got it? It is purged form my mind, and we are never speaking of it again.”

Dabi eyes her suspiciously. “Until you can make fun of me for fucking Hawks, you mean.”

She’s his twin, making fun of him is one of her main purposes in life. But she has to correct him: “Until I can make fun of you for your boyfriend without having to be faced with the actual evidence.”

“He’s not my boyfriend, we aren’t dating.”

Fuyumi eyes him reproachfully. “That counts as something I didn’t want to know, Dabi.”

Dabi flushes and runs a hand down his face. He doesn’t meet her eyes, resolutely ignoring her. “You get the side by the wall. Just go the fuck to sleep and try not to rip out any more of my staples before morning.”

Chapter Text

Fuyumi wakes up to a ceiling not her own, and it takes her a few moments to remember why. Then she has to sit up and stare at a wall as she processes all over again that no, this was not a dream, her twin is alive and went and joined the weirdest villain group Fuyumi has ever met.

Well, that’s not a fair metric; she hasn’t met any villain groups before. They’re just the weirdest group she’s ever heard of.

Dabi is still asleep next to her, curled around a pillow. It makes her heart pang, because she remembers going into his room late at night to talk when they weren’t quite teenagers yet and seeing him curled up defensively, soft organs and face protected only to expose the bony jut of his spine. Always hungry, always hurting, but he’d uncoil a little bit, as long as she was there.

Like now. Softer than what she remembers, arm draped over the extra pillow instead of squeezing it to death, dark hair splayed over the pillow, breathing quietly with no sign of waking.

Fuyumi watches him for a while, but the longer she waits, the less she knows what to do with the softness and the longing of the morning, and the fact of the matter is that she is stuck between Dabi and the wall. He can always take a nap later, and she has questions for him, so she puts a hand on his shoulder to wake him up.

Maybe it’s that it’s been so long, or maybe it’s that it’s finally registered that this is her twin, the same boy who used to dunk her in the koi pond in the backyard and who she used to drag in after her, but instead of shaking, she shoves.

Dabi hits the ground snarling like a cat. “—the fuck—what?” He glares up at her, baffled and affronted and still sleep-muddled. “Did you just push me off the bed?”

Fuyumi blinks, but that hardly needs an answer when she’s up here and he’s down there. “Did you bring my phone with you?” she asks instead.

Dabi snarls again and pushes himself to his feet, shaking himself awake. “Unbelievable. I can’t believe I fucking missed you.”

Fuyumi brightens. “So you admit you missed me!” Dabi scowls harder, caught, and stalks over to the bed to try to smother her with the blanket.

To no one’s surprise, the blanket catches fire.

A minute or so of panicked swearing later and the bed and a good portion of the adjacent wall is coated in ice crystals, the blanket and probably the sheets are almost certainly a dead loss, but the mattress seems like it should be okay. Maybe a bit smoky smelling, though.

“I was very happy not having a fire quirk, and I cannot wait to go back to that,” Fuyumi says, still a little breathless with adrenaline as her heart pounds. “That’s the worst morning wake up ever. Zero out of ten, would not recommend.”

Dabi opens his mouth angrily, but he closes it again and, instead of speaking, takes in a long breath through his nose. She can’t believe he’s better at controlling his temper as a villain than he was as a preteen. “You know what? Me too. I also cannot wait until you stop setting shit on fire.”

“It was an accident!”

“Tell that to my fucking bedsheets, Yumi. Ugh, I’m too tired for this shit—“ He goes for the door, but Fuyumi yelps and snatches the back of his shirt to slow him down. He spins around and smacks her hand away with a scowl. “What?”

“Mask,” Fuyumi reminds him. “You’re the one that needs to hide your face.”

Dabi snarls in annoyance and tears through the backpack he brought until he comes up with a fresh medical mask. Even with half his face hidden once he hooks it over his ears, his expression would probably send criminals skittering out of his way at twenty feet. “I’m going to make sure the dye isn’t in danger fading out enough to see the streaks, yet. Don’t burn the house down in the next five minutes.”

“I’m not that bad.”

“Evidence says otherwise.”

“Just tell me where my phone is first—you better have brought it, I have to email work to tell them I’m going to be out all week, and I don’t think you want me emailing from your laptop for that.”

Dabi obligingly digs her phone out from where he stowed it in her backpack, but he hesitates before handing it over. “Do you have any tracking apps? Find My iPhone or any of those partner apps for people to ask where you are?”

Fuyumi almost asks him why it matters, but then the obvious answer occurs to her and she bites her lip. “…I don’t think so, but I don’t pay a lot of attention to that. Wait, I know I have one of those apps you can use when walking in bad areas, where if you don’t respond or something then it’ll call someone? But only if I activate it first.”

Dabi rubs his forehead and sits down on the edge of his desk—or tries to, anyway, except that he misjudges his current height and bangs his hip against the edge instead. He scowls, leans firmly (but much more carefully) against the desk, and starts flipping her phone around in his hand. “Okay, sounds like Natsuo wouldn’t be able to find you on his own, but your girlfriend could if she decided to throw her resources behind it. You aren’t obvious, but haven’t bothered hiding yourself.”

“Why would I?” Fuyumi challenges. “I don’t have anything to hide.”

“I do,” Dabi mutters. He lets out an explosive sigh. “And I kind of left Natsu high and dry. He probably won’t want to get the old man involved, but if he actually thinks you’re in trouble—not that he should—then… well. And your girlfriend’ll be quicker on the trigger, so that’s it’s own issue—“

“So I’ll tell them I’m fine,” Fuyumi says firmly. “Make sure they know not to try to find me.”

“That’s literally the most suspicious way you could phrase it,” Dabi informs her drily.

“No, the most suspicious way to phrase it would be, ‘I can’t tell you where I am or who I’m with because our brother is here and doesn’t want you to know.’ Which is also true. This situation is sketchy, but I know you’d do something about it if I wasn’t safe, so I will make it sound… not that.”

“And how are you going to do that?” Dabi demands.

Fuyumi smiles. “By making you sound like the ridiculous edge lord you are! Does Natsuo know you’re doing anything illegal? How much should I imply?”

Dabi stares at her, eyes half-lidded and expression flat. “I’m going to regret this, aren’t I?” Fuyumi just smiles wider, and he rolls his eyes and starts to turn on her phone. “No names. No implications. …The fewer outright lies you tell, the easier it’ll be for you to keep straight, though, and remember you need to keep it to text because there’s a risk he could recognize my voice from something else, or at some point in the future—“

“I get it, you worry wart.” Fuyumi holds her hand out for her phone. “I’ll email the school, first, and that way if you get the jitters you can just turn the phone off again, okay?”

Dabi scowls, but he nods and hands it over before stalking out of the room. Fuyumi rolls her eyes a little. She should probably feel weirder about her brother holding onto her phone for this long, but she’s willing to give him some leeway when one mistake on her part could end up harming his accidentally-adopted family of mistfits. If he’d actually tried to stop her, that would have been a different story, but he just wants her to be careful. She can do careful.

She write the email to her school’s principal, first, neat and professional and practically cookie-cutter. She’s an excellent employee, so while she scatters a few apologies throughout for the inconvenience, with the lesson plans she has on file and her impeccable record, she doesn’t actually feel guilty about it. Her students might miss her, and she’ll miss them as well, but they’ll get what they need without her.

When she opens the texting app and navigates to her last conversation with Natsuo, though, she bites her lip and hesitates. There’s already a lot of texts to be read—Natsuo trying to order Dabi back, first with annoyance, then with pleas, then with an increasing amount of profanity. The last text is an ultimatum: get back to Natsuo, with or without Fuyumi, by noon the next day, or Natsuo will get Miruko involved as well as Endeavor if he has to.

That sends chills down Fuyumi’s spine. Natsuo is deadly serious, but Natsuo has no idea how deadly that ‘serious’ could wind up being.

But there’s hours left until then, so Fuyumi takes her time thinking of how to introduce this conversation and exactly what angle she wants to play. Simple, unconcerned, but sort of hush-hush, she decides. Nothing dangerous, just awkward. Hmmm.

Fuyumi:
Good news: I only set things on fire a little bit by accident, and one of Touya’s friends put it out!
Bad news: Touya’s friends are extremely weird.
Good news: At least two of Touya’s friends may or may not like me better than him at this point :D

Natsuo:
Fuyumi??? Fuyumi did that asshole fucking KIDNAP you?
Where are
Wait
First, tell me what I got you for Christmas last year. And Shouto.

Fuyumi:
Natsu you got him a freaking toy guillotine. With a matching Endeavor toy.
Though I am putting the paper shredder to good use still :)

Natsuo:
And the Endeavor poster?

Fuyumi:
No :) Comment :)

Natsuo:
Lmao
Okay good it’s actually you

Fuyumi:
Did you really think Touya kidnapped me???

Natsuo:
Okay but technically he sort of DID?
He ditched me on purpose and I didn’t have any idea where he could have gone, because he wouldn’t tell me anything about himself. I don’t even know what PREFECTURE he’s in
Pretending to be you to get me off his back isn’t something I’m putting past him.
For the record if you are kidnapped, lmk and I will 100% get your girlfriend to wherever you are asap

Fuyumi:
There’s really no need for that
I told you, his friends are a little weird but I promise I’m safe.

Touya has asked for no pictures, apparently because he’s feeling shy (he claims he isn’t but I don’t know what else to call it, he just scowls???) and I don’t think he’s ready to actually talk to you face to face

Natsuo:
He seemed fine earlier. At least before he took off without even saying anything.
When are you guys switching back? Did he tell you how? I still have the girl’s mom’s number so we can set it up.

Fuyumi:
Touya can bullshit with the best of them, and I’m sure that doesn’t surprise you.
He told me about it, but… I have kind of a ridiculous idea.

Natsuo:
Oh no
Just tell me, rip the bandaid off, what fresh hell have you come up with

Fuyumi:
I’m not that bad!

Natsuo:
Yes you are.

Fuyumi:
Lies and slander. Anyway.
Touya is leery about going anywhere you could meet him in person and he’s iffy about talking to the girl’s mom again because of it. BUT
If we just… stay swapped for the week

Natsuo:
…Oh my god. Fuyumi.

Fuyumi:
I’m just saying I can basically hold Touya’s body hostage until he gets used to the idea that we know he exists and stops being so antisocial! So I’ll be able to drag him back for a family dinner.
(Just us siblings, of course.)

Natsuo:
Fuyumi no.

Fuyumi:
Fuyumi yes, actually

Natsuo:
What about your job???

Fuyumi:
This is a family emergency. :)
I’ve already requested the week off.

Natsuo:
Are you sure this is a good idea?

Fuyumi:
It’ll be fine.
And I can’t lose him again, Natsuo.

Natsuo:
…Okay.
I don’t really understand it, and I’m still not sure I’m convinced, but he’s not my twin.
Just promise me you’ll text me every day to keep me updated and let me know if you change your mind. And don’t let Touya talk you into something stupid!

Fuyumi:
I won’t. I’m not letting him run away from his problems no matter how much he wants to :)

Natsuo:
…Is he really that different?

Fuyumi:
Wdym?

Natsuo:
If he doesn’t want to send pictures. Don’t we already know what he looks like?
Fuyumi?
Still there?

Fuyumi:
I’m respecting his privacy, that’s all, Natsu. I’ll be honest, I don’t know if I’d have picked him out of a crowd, but it’s been ten years.
And you would not BELIEVE the amount of piercings he has.
I haven’t counted them all and am really honestly scared to? There’s a lot. So many. He’s such an edge lord, I feel like I shouldn’t be surprised but I am. I feel like I’m going to wind up making someone bleed, potentially myself. There’s just. So many.
He has four cartilage piercings in each ear. Just in the cartilage.
I DON’T EVEN WEAR EARRINGS MOST DAYS

Natsuo:
LMFAO
Can you take them out temporarily?

Fuyumi:
Iiiiii don’t know about that
There might be
Problems

Natsuo:
Is Touya going to throw a bitch fit about it? Asshole

Fuyumi:
I mean it is his body
Also I think his friends would die laughing if I wore pastel
Oooh now that’s really tempting
One of them helped me paint my (his??) nails black and it’s pretty great

Natsuo:
God I can’t get over the body swap weirdness but I am LIVING for this spite
Speaking of
Did he tell you that he got swept off his feet by your girlfriend in about ten seconds???

Fuyumi:
…I think the terminology he used was that he “ran into” her?

Natsuo:
HAHAHAHA
Yeah no
Pretty sure you can use this shit as blackmail if he gets bitchy about anything, so listen up >:)))

“…Can I read whatever you wrote to Natsu?”

“You realize you sound like a stalker boyfriend, right?” Fuyumi needs him to acknowledge that.

Dabi stops cold and makes a face like he just got a brain freeze, not that he’s ever had one in his life. Huh, she should arrange that at some point in the next week. “Why the fuck would you put that image in my head?” he demands, pained. “I don’t care what you told him. I just want a goddamn heads up if you accidentally set the police on us. Or worse, the fucking Heroes. You don’t have the practice I do dodging that kind of thing.”

That does make sense—and Fuyumi doesn’t want anyone to find them either. “You can read it, but you can’t complain about my story, because it’ll totally work.”

“That statement fills me with dread, but fine,” Dabi sighs. He holds his hand out for the phone, and Fuyumi pulls up her conversation with Natsuo before handing it over.

Dabi’s eyebrows steadily raise higher and higher as he reads. “That’s the story you’re going with?”

“You’re not allowed to complain,” she reminds him.

Dabi snorts and shakes his head, thumb scrolling slowly. “At least Natsuo realizes how much of a headache this week is going to be. Almost makes me regret ditching him.“ He reads further and immediately shoots her an unimpressed look. “Piercings?”

“Bits of metal stuck in your skin that you can take out and put in again,” Fuyumi points out. “It works.”

“Yeah, that’s stretching it. I think Natsuo is my favorite right—“ Dabi goes abruptly quiet, eyes narrowing. His expression goes flatter and flatter, but he stays silent until he reaches the end of the conversation. He locks the phone and slowly looks up. “That little shit is dead to me.”

“I’m pretty sure you’re the one dead to us, going off the death certificate and all.” Dabi gives her a reproachful look and she smiles brightly back, like that might soften the blow. “Also, we need code names for… our little brothers. In case we need to talk about them in front of the others.”

“Or we could just pretend they don’t exist.”

Fuyumi rolls her eyes. “Stop running from your siblings at the speed of light, Dabi, we aren’t going to bite you.”

Dabi scoffs, clearly skeptical, but she’s going to assume that’s his exposure to Himiko talking. She does seem very… bitey.

He tosses her phone back to her. Off, not just locked, Fuyumi realizes, but that’s apparently better for avoiding tracking, so that’s fine. “If we have to, I guess. Not the first syllables, though. Tsu and To—no, Tou. Lengthen it a little.”

“…Unconventional.”

“They’re supposed to be,” Dabi says sharply. “Nat and Shou are just too fucking obvious. We don’t want anyone here to guess.”

She wants to express doubt that any of the League could pull their identities out of the air based off of that, but then she remembers that Hawks is presumably going to come back to hand around at some point. He might not know her family well, but he interacts with her enough to stand a chance of finding out. “I guess you’re right,” Fuyumi concedes. “So. Is there anything else, or can we head down for breakfast?”

“Just give me a fucking minute, I—“ Dabi stops, visibly wrestling with himself for a long moment before his shoulders finally slump in defeat. “Is there any way to figure out the fuck to put that death trap on that isn’t going to make both of us want to die?”

Fuyumi rolls her eyes. “It’s not that hard.” She snatches the bra off of the top of the backpack and loops it around her torso, over her shirt. “Look, it takes about five seconds. You latch it in the front, where you can see it, and then you can just twist it around before sticking your arms through the straps,” Fuyumi narrates.

She takes it off just as quickly and throws it at his face; Dabi squawks, but catches it before it hits the floor. His ears are flushed a mortified pink, and he’s very obviously refusing to look at her. He better not have missed her demonstration, or she really is going to leave him to figure it out on his own. “I’m locking myself in the closet again,” he announces aggressively, and stalks off to do just that.

“I promise I’ll accept you whenever you choose to come out!” she calls after him.

“Oh, fuck you.”

Chapter Text

They finally make their way down to the kitchen to start breakfast without Fuyumi trying to mock him once. Dabi is honestly astonished, at this point—Fuyumi’s supposed to be the polite one, but he forgot over the years that that never meant she’d be polite to him.

Once they’re out of their room, though, Dabi can see her guard go up again. Less tired, she’s more wary of the people around her, but that’s not going to change except through exposure. He makes sure to leave the kitchen door open when they start making enough omurice for at least the early risers, but the others know not to crowd him when he’s cooking, so it’ll just be the two of them actually in the kitchen. That should keep Fuyumi calm enough.

…Calm enough for questions, as it turns out.

“I’ve been wondering this since we swapped—why villainy?”

Dabi rolls his eyes up to the ceiling. She sure doesn’t pull her punches, does she? He can at least give her a more honest answer than Natsuo had gotten, when he asked where Touya had gone. “There are not a lot of employment opportunities for an underage teenager who looks like he just walked out of Frankenstein’s lab. You get used to being on the wrong side of the law, and then, well, the League was recruiting.”

He’d wanted their resources, their pull, and their goals—at least, what he’d assumed were there goals. Shigaraki doesn’t have half the conviction he’d hoped for on the revolution front, but Dabi’s still here because—well. He just is. He doesn’t wonder why too hard, because doesn’t make a big habit of self-reflection, these days. It usually ends with him picking at his staples until he bleeds, and he’s tired of people scolding him about it.

Fuyumi frowns and look into the living room through the door. Twice is slumped on the couch with an open book over his face, clearly having fallen asleep while trying to read. Dabi doesn’t see any of the others, but the direction of her thoughts are obvious.

“How long have you known all of them?”

“Couple months?” Dabi guesses. Come to think of it, he’s not entirely sure he knows what month it is now. Hmm. Well, it’s not like he keeps track of the passing weeks like a schoolteacher would. “Basically after the Stain shit. Before that it was just Shigaraki and his creepy Sensei. And Kurogiri, I guess.”

“…And what about you?”

“What about me?”

Fuyumi picks up the pan—and almost burns herself, so she has to adjust her grip, but she’s better about it now than she was yesterday—to start dishing the omurice onto the plates laid out. “I mean, you’ve been gone a lot longer than a couple months. So what were you up to for the other nine years?”

Dabi blinks slowly. “Mental health break,” he deadpans.

Fuyumi’s disapproving look is weirdly like Mom’s, despite the metal and the scars. She does, at least, decide to play along with his story, which puts her one up on Natsuo. “I don’t know what to be more disappointed in: the fact that your ‘break’ lasted nine years, or that it still clearly wasn’t long enough.”

Dabi snorts. It’s… funny, or at least he wants it to be. He doesn’t want it to hurt. This is the first twelve hours in the past decade that he hasn’t felt constant pain from his scars or staples or anything else wrong with him, so of course it’s when he’s stuck with pain anyway.

But it’s like other pain. If he ignores it long enough, he’ll learn to live with it.

Because that’s what he really spent those nine years doing: learning to live with the pain, learning to keep breathing when he wondered if it might not be better to stop. Learning to survive when he had nothing. Those first few months had been hell, especially.

“What the hell was I supposed to do instead?” Dabi asks, and—shit, that’s not ignoring it. That’s more hurt than he intended to show. That’s more of a genuine question than he intended to ask.

“Call your mother?” Fuyumi shoots back. “Or literally any of your siblings?”

Ice starts forming on the plate he’s holding; Dabi can’t help it. He puts it down before he freezes the food, too. “You know I couldn’t have gone back. You know damn well what would have happened.”

Fuyumi stops. Sighs. She turns to him, and she isn’t snippy anymore, just achingly honest. “I do know,” Fuyumi says, and she sounds—exhausted. In pain. He did that to her, didn’t he? “I’m not trying to say you should’ve come back, but you could’ve at least told me you were alive. Do you know what that’s like, thinking your twin isn’t just out of reach, but dead?”

Her voice is still low and soft. Quiet. Their arguments were always so quiet, and here they are again. Dabi grits his teeth, bitterness bubbling up and threatening to leak through like bile.

There’s time he knows he’s missing just after the scars, from pain and drugs and just the damage, but he remembers altogether too much of it. He remembers almost trying to sneak in to visit mom, before convincing himself it’d be too dangerous for both of them. He remembers almost, almost going back to find Fuyumi. But mostly, he remembers all those weeks he spend bed bound at the mercy of the generosity of an old nurse with vigilante sympathies, eyes glued to the TV and wondering if he’d have to take the risk and run. If anyone would recognize him.

If anyone would miss him.

“Because you were mourning me so hard,” Dabi bites out, bitter.

There’s a clatter from the stove as Fuyumi drops the pan the last two inches down. She turns around in a faltering movement, like she doesn’t think she heard him right, and she stares at him like she’s looking at a ghost. “What? Why the hell would you think I wasn’t?”

“There wasn’t even a funeral,” he accuses.

“You know that wasn’t my choice,” Fuyumi says, voice shaking. She sounds shocky, like Spinner had the night after Kamino, when he’d realized people had actually died and they’d helped it happen. “I’m surprised he even interned the ashes they gave us, he burned every picture of you in the house.”

Dabi already knew he looked different. He already knew how he’d changed. But to have Shouto’s utter lack of recognition in the forest so abruptly recontextualized, to realize his own twin might not have recognized him if circumstances had been different? That’s a whole new kind of horror.

“And you couldn’t save any of it?”

You couldn’t save me?

He knows that isn’t fair; they were kids, both of them. But he can’t help the unfairness of a grief he could never outgrow, because he could never mourn the boy that no longer existed.

“There had to be someone left,” Fuyumi whispers.

A chill goes down Dabi’s spine. “What?”

“We lost you and mom in the same two months.” Fuyumi balls her hands into fists, but he can still see them shaking until she shoves them roughly into the pockets of his coat. “Tsu was nine. Tou was five. Someone had to take care of them, and we both know dad wouldn’t have, so I—there had to be someone left.” She stares blankly at the counter, seeing something far removed from this time and place. He stares at her, and the downward angle of her face and the hunch in her shoulders, and wonders if she would be crying if she could.

“He wouldn’t have hurt you,” Dabi says slowly, unwillingly. He didn’t leave her in danger. He failed her, yes, but it was Shouto he couldn’t save, not Fuyumi.

“I saw your face around every street corner for months,” Fuyumi admits bitterly. Her teeth are clenched together, each word tapping against them before slipping out into the air like the precise way they used to tap each other’s feet under the table when they hadn’t been given permission to speak. “I had to make myself stop looking if I didn’t want to end up in a room next to Mom’s.”

She says it quietly, because they’ve always kept their pain quiet between them. Silent snow falling to cover and soften every sin they’ve ever witnessed, and nothing like the snapping fire of the doors slamming down the hallway or the impact of a fist on flesh.

Dabi flinches anyway.

“I know,” Fuyumi tells him, pressing the heel of her hand against one eye in a clear sign that she wants to cry and can’t. Dabi wants to get the eye drops out for her, but simultaneously cringes at the mere possibility that she might touch him right now, even incidentally. “I know it hurts, Dabi, I was there.”

No you weren’t, he wants to say. He knows what she means; she told him just yesterday how she’d heard him screaming. But she didn’t feel her skin melting off, and she doesn’t know what it is to burn alive; she’s only now experiencing even the echoes of that old pain. Dabi was the only one that burned, and that’s how he likes it, but—No. You weren’t.

But he damn well knows when to keep his mouth shut.

Fuyumi doesn’t push him, and she doesn’t say anything else. She pats down his coat to find the eye drops without prompting and puts in too many. The saline drips down her face and Fuyumi squeezes her eyes shut like she needs to be crying, right now. Like the tears are somehow supposed to help.

Dabi belatedly recognizes the burning in his own eyes as the byproduct of emotions. This is the exact fucking reason that he does his level fucking best to avoid emotions, most days, but that’s apparently going to be difficult with his twin around stirring up shit he’d buried years ago. He stares dead-eyed at a wall, carefully turned away from Fuyumi, until his eyes are dry and almost scratchy the way he’s gotten used to.

The tension in the air between them doesn’t evaporate, still swollen like heavy rain clouds.

Fuyumi is used to being the peacemaker in her home. She’s used to soothing egos and calming upsets, and after all these years, she’s good at it too—which is probably why it’s not just stressful but frustrating that she has no idea what to do with the tension in the room.

Dabi has visibly closed himself off from their conversation. If he were Shouto, Fuyumi could continue anyway, make sure she’s said what she needs to even if he stayed dead silent. If he were Natsuo, he wouldn’t have gone silent, because Natsuo has never backed down from an argument in his life even when Fuyumi had begged him to.

But Dabi isn’t like them—he’s like her. Which means this is going to build and spill over in splashes of pain in some awful cycle until something finally cracks, and she can only hope it won’t be one of them.

It’s useless to try to start this again right now, though. What she needs is something to break this damnable silence.

“Mochi!”

Dabi jumps. Fuyumi takes care to lower her voice; she hadn’t meant to be loud, she’s just. Stressed.

“I’m just going to—make the mochi I started last night!” She doesn’t know why she’s telling him this, he doesn’t care. There’s just nothing else she can think of to say.

Fuyumi is just about to start rummaging around the cupboards when Twice stumbles up to the doorway, rubbing at his eyes. His mask is still pulled down to his snow, but Fuyumi can see his blond stubble. She’s a little surprised to find no visible mutations, but then, she hasn’t exactly asked why he’s always wearing his villain costume. “Good morning, guys! It’s a terrible morning, who the fuck invented mornings.”

“Food’s on the island,” Dabi says flatly, and continues ignoring them both.

Twice sweeps up a plate of omurice and digs in. “I heard something about mochi?”

Fuyumi cringes. “I’m sorry, did I wake you up?”

“Interrupted my fucking beauty sleep—but I was having a really weird dream, so it’s probably better that you did!”

“Oh! That’s good.” Probably. It makes her feel better, anyway. “I’m just. Going to get the mochi dough out of the fridge and warm it up.” Why is she still narrating. She wants to stop, but she’s still so buzzed with the anxiety and discomfort of that conversation that if she doesn’t talk she’ll probably cry—or try to, since Dabi’s stupid tear ducts can’t.

Twice doesn’t seem bothered by it, at least. “Mochi’s tasty, I don’t think I’ve ever had it homemade! Are you even any good at it? Do you need any help? I need a break from my book, anyway.” He lifts a hand and hunches his shoulders to stage whisper to her, “I think it’s what caused my dream in the first place.”

“Well, I—wouldn’t mind the help…” Fuyumi looks to Dabi. She really needs to ask what’s going on with Twice soon—she doesn’t want to make assumptions, but she doesn’t know which side of him to listen to, or if there’s a part of him likely to get dangerous.

Dabi half-shrugs with one shoulder. “Just remember the kitchen rules, Twice.”

Twice aims a pair of finger guns at  him. “You got it, Dabi!”

Dabi pushes off the island and slouches toward the door that leads out to the dining room, stopping by Fuyumi for a moment and leaning in. “He’s fine, just more friendly than he has any damn right to be. Just… don’t let him use the stove, he’s still on kitchen probation.” He pauses, then adds in a quieter voice, “And whatever you do, don’t tell Twice anything that you want to stay secret. Mmkay?”

Fuyumi nods slowly. Dabi leaves.

So Twice is safe to be around, then. Fuyumi is once bitten, twice shy after Rei’s encounter with mental health issues turned violent, but she knows her experience isn’t anywhere near universal. If Dabi trusts him, then so will Fuyumi.

“Great. Twice, have you ever made mochi before?”

Twice laughs and rubs the back of his head bashfully. “Not really, but I’d love to learn! And I like helping. You need all the help you can get.”

His voice changes a little when he turns suddenly negative. Fuyumi makes a mental note and smiles at him. “Then I’ll show you. I’ve already started warming up the dough—usually you don’t refrigerate it, but I didn’t have time to do this all last night—can you get two rolling pins? I’ll get the potato starch.”

Twice has boundless energy and takes both direction and gentle correction well, as Fuyumi shows him how thin to roll the dough and how to make sure it doesn’t stick to the table or his hands. She sets him to cutting circles into it as she pulls out the ice cream she’d scooped into balls and then refrozen, and then she shows him how to shape the dough around the ice cream and set it back into the pan to be re-frozen.

Twice has cut an astonishing amount of circles. They might actually need to pull out some red bean paste to use up the rest of them.

They’re most of the way done with the first tray of ice cream when Fuyumi decides to broach the subject. “Twice,” she says carefully. “Would it be… rude, if I asked about your—“ She stops. She realizes belatedly that she has no idea what his sudden changes in tone are actually from. Is is some sort of involuntary verbal tic? A different personality? Maybe a quirk-related phenomenon, seeing as his name does imply two?

Twice visibly deflates, and his laugh is self-conscious. “Oh, right! The whole arguing with myself thing. None of your business.”

“It’s fine if it isn’t!” Fuyumi says earnestly, despite the fact that the others seem to ignore his second statements. She feels the need to be clear on that. “I’m curious, but I don’t want to make you uncomfortable. It might, um, be helpful to know if there’s something I should avoid saying that would make you uncomfortable? I’ve never met someone who… has multiple selves? Is it—are there more than one of you? Or…”

Twice suddenly looks mere inches from bursting into happy tears. Fuyumi has no idea how she can tell, since his entire head is covered by a mask, but apparently his expressiveness expands beyond the constrictions of his actual physical form—it’s very impressive. “Wow, you’re so sweet, Ihai! Nah, I’m just Twice. It’s always me, just sometimes I don't always get along with myself. Got a lot of conflicting thoughts running around, you know? I’m always right, don’t listen to him. But I’m—hey!”

Fuyumi presses her lips together, unsure if it would be cruel to laugh. He sounds so indignant.

“Anyway, it’s just arguing as long as I have the mask on. Because I can just be me, whatever thoughts there are. That’s why I joined the League, you know—they accept me. The rest of the world doesn’t have room for insane people.”

Fuyumi’s smile wobbles, thinking of Rei in her hospital room. A decade and more lost to that room, because her mind broke and no one has been interested in making sure she was safe instead of just locked away. “…It should,” she says quietly. “I wish it had room. I wish…”

“You’re a nice lady, Ihai. Wishes are fucking worthless.”

“Thank you, Twice,” Fuyumi says, “but I think you’re right. Wishes aren’t going to do you any good. I’m just glad you found people who care about you enough to make sure you can be yourself.”

She wants to ask how scared he was, when he realized what was happening. She wants to tell him she was scared, too, when she thought her own mind might betray her, make her hurt someone like her mother did. Years away from the incident, she knows that isn’t how it works, that most people who see things that aren’t there or experience other symptoms of psychosis never try to hurt another human being, but she still remembers that terror of her own mind.

But Dabi told her to be careful, because Twice can’t keep a secret. And what happened to their mother is a secret—their altercation earlier was vague enough not to give a clue, so Fuyumi needs to take care not to give one out now.

“It must be nice to have somewhere to belong,” Fuyumi says instead.

“It’s the best,” Twice sighs happily. “You can belong here too, you know.”

“I didn’t mean it like that!” Fuyumi assures him. “I’m—I have a home. And the villainy kind of… gets in the way of me belonging, I think.”

“You’re way too soft for this place. Oh, but it doesn’t have to be like that! Do you want me to teach you to hot-wire a car?”

Fuyumi stops molding mochi to blink at him in bemusement.

“What? Do you not want to? Of course she doesn’t, you idiot.” Twice breaks into a muttering arguing with himself, with additional frantic handwaving.

“I don’t actually want to steal things,” Fuyumi says carefully. She quickly finishes wrapping up the last mochi on their current tray and goes to exchange it with the second one in the freezer with unwrapped ice cream. “I don’t think I’d have the nerve to, even if I didn’t have a personal objection to it.”

Twice droops. “Right, that would—“ He jerks upright, and Fuyumi can almost see the lightbulb going off over his head. “Lock picking! I can teach you lock picking, and that can be useful if you—uh, forgot your apartment keys somewhere or something? Though you can use hot-wiring like that too…”

“That’s true,” Fuyumi admits. “But, Twice? I know Dabi is a villain, but I’m still getting used to what that actually means, so I don’t think I’ll really follow him down that path. Not that I’m going to walk away because of it, though! I’ll figure out how it fits together, I want him in my life.”

Fuyumi glares down at her mochi, refusing to look up at Twice. She knows it won’t fit together, but she doesn’t know what to do about it. For the next week, she has a ready-made excuse for why she isn’t walking right up to the police and turning all of them in, twin or no twin, but after… She can’t abandon Dabi like that. She can’t. But what does that mean for her? What does it mean for her girlfriend, who’s a Hero?

She isn’t sure a week is long enough to answer all those questions, but it’s all she has.

“You must care about Dabi a lot!” Twice tells her earnestly. He’s about to ruin the mochi he’s working on with all his gesturing about, but she doesn’t have the heart to point that out. “And he cares about you. You two make me sick. I get it, though, the League are my family now, and I’d do anything for them.”

Fuyumi smiles at him, a little tentatively. “That’s sweet,” she says encouragingly. It’s good to see the family Dabi’s made.

“Yeah, normally I wouldn’t hurt a fly, but if someone tried to hurt anyone here, I’d totally murder them.”

His voice doesn’t change during the last phrase. Fuyumi’s smile freezes on her face. “Oh. That’s… sweet?”

“Especially Toga! She’s my best friend. I’d let her rot.” Twice cocks his head. “Wouldn’t you murder someone for Dabi?”

There’s green tea ice cream melting over her fingertips. She quickly forms another mochi ball to give her hands something to do while she tries to come up with an answer to that minefield she just stumbled on. “I don’t think murder is a good thing, Twice,” she says carefully.

“Ever?”

“Ever,” Fuyumi says firmly.

Twice puts an elbow on the table and rests his chin in his hand. “I don’t get it. Don’t you want to protect him?”

“I’m not sure he needs my protection,” Fuyumi mutters, but—Dabi has scars. Horrific scars. He needed protection, once, and maybe he still does, but what she really means is that she isn’t sure she could be the protection he needed. Louder, she tells Twice, “There’s other ways to do that, and better ways to show you value people than murdering people for them. It’s—I actually do that by cooking and cleaning for people. That’s what I do for family.”

Twice looks down at the mochi they’re making together. His body language brightens as a realization visibly strikes him. “Ohhh, so you care about us too?”

“It’s kind of a habit, the cooking.“ But that isn’t the whole truth. “…But I’m starting to, yes.” She shrugs, a little self-conscious. “Toga did declare herself my little sister, after all.”

It’s more complicated than that. It’s leagues—ha—more complicated than that, but honestly Fuyumi has a lot of mixed feelings about the little group she’s been dropped onto, and she needs some time to work through that. For now, she’ll settle for categorizing this villainous pack of misfits as Dabi’s family, and she’ll figure out how to incorporate them into her own sooner or later.

She’s still trying to clear out the old spot in her life for her twin until there’s room enough for Dabi to fit in it again, so it’s a work in progress.

Chapter Text

“Hi, Spinner!” Fuyumi waves, and Spinner’s scrunched-up, baffled expression makes her immediately want to smack herself in the face. She’s so used to looking like a nice, trustworthy schoolteacher, but it must look really weird to have some of her more deliberately polite mannerisms on Dabi’s edge-lord of an aesthetic. This is going to take some practice, but she just wants Dabi’s friends-slash-replacement family members to like her. She tries not to worry about it too hard. “Or is there another name you’d prefer I use for you?”

“Just Spinner is fine,” he says unenthusiastically, eyeing her warily. He’s holding a gaming console Fuyumi doesn’t know enough about to name in his hands, but he hasn’t actually turned it on yet. “What did you want?”

“I just want to make sure I get to know everyone.” Fuyumi sits down on the couch close enough to be easy to talk to, but not close enough to be pushy. At least, that’s how she hopes the distance is interpreted. Spinner is staring at her and does not seem to have blinked yet, but she doesn’t know if that’s normal for him or not. She hasn’t observed a whole lot of lizards in her life, nor has she met very many people with reptile quirks.

“Why?”

…Well, that was blunt. A fair question, though. Fuyumi spares a moment to wonder if Dabi will ever forgive her if she tells Spinner she wants to get to know her twin’s new family—based on current evidence, she’s forced to admit the answer is a strong probably not. Dabi treats verbalized emotion like he’s allergic to it. “Well, I am going to be here for the rest of the week,” she offers. “That’ll get awkward if we’re just ignoring each other the whole time.”

Spinner gives a dissatisfied grunt.

Fuyumi falters. “Unless it’s already awkward. Do I make you uncomfortable somehow?”

Spinner gives her a sideways look like he thinks she’s joking. “Besides the fact that you look like Dabi and act like someone’s nice civilian girlfriend?”

“I—don’t actually know if that’s supposed to be an insult or not,” Fuyumi says slowly. She is someone’s nice civilian girlfriend, it’s just that she’s Rumi’s, and with Rumi being a Hero, that probably ends up with different implications than Spinner means.

“The girlfriend part or the looking like Dabi part? Because they’re definitely both insults.”

That startles a laugh out of Fuyumi. “You and Dabi fight a lot, don’t you.”

Spinner blinks at her. His hands fidget and tap out an asymmetric pattern on the case of his gaming console. “I mean, I guess. He’s an ass, someone has to keep him on his toes.”

“True.” Fuyumi chews her lip. “Though, Spinner—really, if you don’t want to talk to me, I won’t be offended if you just say so. I’m not going to start crying hysterically or anything.”

“I don’t care if you talk to me.” Spinner’s shoulders hitch up and he curls around the handheld console. Quieter, he grumbles, “I just don’t get what your angle is.”

“My angle?”

Spinner rolls his eyes with some measure of exasperation. “Your… whatever it is you get out of this. Coming over and talking to me.”

“Do I need to get something out of it? I just want to get to know—“

“I’ll buy that from the League,” Spinner cuts her off. “But you’re normal. Normal people don’t talk to people who look like me.”

He says it with such conviction that Fuyumi temporarily draws a blank on what he must mean. His quirk can’t draw that kind of vitriol from people, can it? Yes, he has scales, but people these days have scales and far stranger, and it’s not like she’s unfamiliar with animal mutations, even if Rumi’s are less immediately visible.

But, well, Fuyumi knows people can be assholes about that sort of thing, and she probably doesn’t know the worst of it. Rumi’s told her some stories—at least, the ones that can be funny or end with her punching someone through a wall, nice and clean cut—and her mutation is pretty low-key compared to Spinner’s. “Because of your quirk?” Fuyumi asks in concern. “Civilians don’t usually react well?”

Spinner scowls and hunches over his console a little further, which is a pretty effective answer. “That’s why I’m here.”

Fuyumi tucks her hands under her thighs and leans forward a little. “Twice said something similar,” Fuyumi says thoughtfully. “He says he doesn’t feel like there’s a place for him out in society, but the League accepts him as he is. They do that for you, too?”

“Dabi calls me a lizard sometimes, but that’s just because he’s a bitch,” Spinner mutters defensively. “Here, no one complains about my face being hard to read or says I should file my claws or teeth down just because it makes them uncomfortable.” He bares said teeth, daring her to shrink away; they’re pointed and vicious-looking.

Fuyumi finds herself indignant on his behalf. “Isn’t that illegal? It is if it was your boss—were your teachers were telling you that too? Because I know it’s illegal for teachers.”

Spinner’s face goes blank with surprise. “Technically illegal, or illegal-illegal?”

“Illegal-illegal,” she assures him. “Depending on the situation, like from a boss or something, the perpetrator can face a pretty hefty fine. It’s not common for it to actually go to court, but those laws are on the books. Lots of people have mutation quirks, and I know there’s discrimination over it, but it isn’t legal to just—can you imagine someone telling Gang Orca to file his teeth down? Because he’s too scary?” She folds her arms and huffs, trying to keep her temper. Spinner probably wouldn’t appreciate her setting him or his seat on fire, even if she is angry on his behalf. And—she has to remember where she is. She winces. “Then again, I guess if people always followed the law and made a functional society, the League wouldn’t exist, would it? I can see why it would be a relief to be around people who don’t treat you like that.”

Spinner is still for a long moment, but slowly his claws start tapping against the console again, building up to a faster pace than before. “Gang Orca is my favorite Hero,” he confesses suddenly—and in a villain’s base, it must really be a confession. Fuyumi wonders if they ever talk about Heroes the way her students do, or Natsuo’s classmates do. Do they hate them all, or just the system that made them? “Stain says All Might is the only true Hero, and I believe him, but Gang Orca at least isn’t fake. Everyone always says he’s scary, though, and they talk like they think he’s going to hurt someone. Like he’s a monster.”

“That’s not what monsters look like,” Fuyumi says softly.

Spinner stares at her. Fuyumi shakes herself and smiles at him to cover up her lapse; the unimpressed look she gets in return reminds her she’s still wearing more staples than she can shake a stick at, and her face probably falls directly into whatever uncanny valley that’s been putting Spinner off of talking to her much previously.

“Um—I have a question about your quirk, if that’s okay,” Fuyumi goes on hastily. “Feel free to tell me off if it’s rude. My—“ Fuyumi pauses, thinks through what she was about to say, and rewinds. “Wait, okay. Avoiding any actual identifying information: I know someone with an animal mutation quirk that I spend a lot of time with, and they have a couple different dietary needs from the quirkless standard. Since I’ve basically taken over meals, is there anything I should know? Even if it’s just your favorite foods being out of the ordinary.”

Spinner squints at her. Not as suspicious as he had in the beginning, but still clearly searching for an ulterior motive. “I mean… I’m an omnivore. I’m not going to pass out if you give me something lizards don’t normally eat. I guess I snack on eggs sometimes?”

Fuyumi nods agreeably. That’s an easy snack, she wouldn’t mind making some if Dabi’s really that stubborn about who is allowed in the kitchen and who isn’t. “Scrambled or easy over? Or—“

“No, I don’t mean—I eat ‘em whole.” Spinner mimes tossing and egg into his mouth and chomping down. His teeth clack together. “Shells are crunchy?”

Fuyumi blinks. Considering she’s seen Rumi mindlessly start chewing on cardboard and swallowing it if she’s sufficiently distracted, eating a whole egg including the shell doesn’t seem very strange. And even if it did—it doesn’t escape her notice that Spinner is watching her with the wary eye of a young man who’s been bit too many times to even consider second chances.

Really, she only has one question for that: “Raw or hard-boiled?”

“Raw.”

Fuyumi nods decisively. “I’ll make sure I don’t use up the last of a whole package without putting more on the shopping list, then, so there’s some left for you.”

Spinner scowls. Fuyumi doesn’t know what answer he was looking for, but he clearly doesn’t know what to do with the one he’s been given. “Why do you act like a fucking yamato nadeshiko, anyway? Do you just not have a personality?”

Fuyumi rolls her eyes. “If you think cleaning and cooking is all it takes to make a woman a yamato nadeshiko, then that explains a lot about the state of this house when I got here,” she says drily. “To answer the question I think you meant to ask: I’m cleaning and cooking because it needs to be done by somebody, and I’m very used to that somebody being me. Also, I don’t have access to any of my actual hobbies here.”

“I don’t think I believe you have hobbies,” Spinner mutters.

Fuyumi can’t tell if he’s teasing her or just has no experience interacting with women. She decides to answer like it’s a real question, just to be safe. “I like to read, but all my books are at home in my room. I like to draw, sometimes, but my sketchbook and my pencils are all at home, too. I’m busy with my work a lot, but I can’t do any of my work here or even really tell you anything about it. I like going on walks, too, but a walk in the park is kind of how this whole mess of a swap happened, and I can’t leave right now anyway. Making food can be interesting if I’m trying something new, but I’m not sure I’d really call it a hobby—it’s only fun when there’s a lot of people to try whatever I make, and that’s not usually true. There’s a lot of you now, though.”

“Oh. …So you’re just going to spend the whole week cooking?” Spinner asks skeptically.

Fuyumi lets out a self-depreciating laugh. “God, I hope not. I’ll annoy Dabi into getting me a sketch pad, or something. I’ll miss my colored pencils, though.”

Spinner twists in his seat to pull one foot up onto the cushion he’s sitting on and loops an arm around his knee. His eyes stray down to the gaming console in his hands and something about the way he blinks reminds Fuyumi of how Rumi’s nose twitches, sometimes. Add that to the way he’s almost pointedly not looking at her when he speaks, and Fuyumi has to bite back a smile at the realization that Spinner has a shy streak hiding behind all his bluster. “Do you ever play video games?”

“My little brother does,” Fuyumi offers. They already know Natsuo exists, so that doesn’t have to be a secret—though, now that she’s thinking of him, Spinner kind of reminds her of Natsuo. At least with how he interacts with Dabi; clearly, Dabi’s found family wasn’t complete without a little brother ready to roast him at every given opportunity and a couple opportunities he has to make on his own. “I’m kind of forbidden from touching his computer, though, on account of being his older sister and his being the definition of obnoxious when he wants to be.”

“Dabi didn’t have any, either? He keeps crushing Compress at Mario Kart, unless he loses his temper on Rainbow Road.”

Fuyumi shrugs instead of trying to parse the latter half of that statement. She’s heard of Mario Kart, but she’s never actually played it; she’s just seen it at a handful of the quieter parties she’d attended at teaching college. “We had other things to worry about when we were younger.”

Spinner turns the console over in his hands. “Well, if you don’t have all of that to worry about now, we have a lot of gaming stuff here. Mostly it’s just Shigaraki and I that play, but sometimes we have game nights with the rest of the League. If you’re bored, I could show you?”

“Are you sure? I’m a little nervous about using something that belongs to Shigaraki, I already set the couch on fire…”

Spinner scoffs. He looks more confident, now—almost excited. “You’re Dabi’s sister, he wouldn’t dust you for that. Hang on, let’s go get him. He’ll be pissed if I start up Smash Ultimate without him.”

Dabi eyes Spinner walking past and considers the pros and cons of tripping him. He’ll bitch, which will be funny, but there’s maybe a fifteen percent chance that the lizard actually has something interesting to say first, so… patience.

Spinner heads straight over to the TV, switch in hand, and starts hooking up whatever black technological magic it is that lets them play the games on the TV. “Hey, Shigaraki, I’m showing Ihai how to play Smash Ultimate. Want to join?”

Dabi blinks and sits up a little straighter. Looking back to the door shows Fuyumi peeking around the hallway with a sort of bemused expression that tells Dabi exactly who’s idea this was.

Shigaraki squints at Spinner. “Why?”

Spinner shrugs. “I don’t know, she’s bored?”

He sounds almost defensive. Dabi glances at Fuyumi again, giving her a stern look—she is not allowed to adopt the League. She might be here for a week, but she’s leaving in a week, and letting Toga paint her nails was bad enough.

Speak of the devil. Toga pounces on Spinner, hanging off of one shoulder like a monkey as he squawks. “We’re bonding with her,” Toga sing-songs with a mischievous little grin.

Fuck. Dabi hates that Toga has her moments of being too good at people—the second she says bonding, Shigaraki reacts like it’s some sort of key word, flipping from the skeptical confusion that most emotion elicits and into what Dabi has somewhat pettily termed his fail leader persona. Because the idiot has apparently never read a book on leadership in his life, yet somehow come up with the idea that team bonding is important, and is dumb enough to never notice when Toga uses it against him with critical effect.

“Okay,” Shigaraki agrees, like a total fucking sucker. “Ihai, get in here. Toga, grab four controllers, you can join.”

Fuyumi obligingly shuffles into the room, giving Dabi a silently baffled look. Dabi doesn’t have an answer for her; Shigaraki’s a weird guy, and he doesn’t know why the hell he’s so obsessed with team bonding. They’re a bunch of wild misfits, not fucking coworkers.

Fuyumi sits down with the rest of them, after giving Dabi one last sideways look. She holds the controller with the delicate awkwardness of someone who has no idea if she’s going to break the controller or if it’ll be the other way around and squints at it cautiously. “So I know that you use the, uh, moving stick to move around, but why are there two of them?”

There’s a beat of silence where Spinner and Shigaraki both stare at her, but then Spinner shakes himself out of it and offers, “They’re, uh, they’re called joysticks. And use the left one, you can just ignore the one on the right for now.”

That’s literally the most helpful Dabi has ever witnessed Spinner be. What the hell? Fuyumi doesn’t seem perplexed by his change of heart, which means it’s definitely her fault—she just nods attentively. “And what do all the buttons do?”

Spinner leans over to show her how his thumb moves on his controller. “These four are the main ones you’re going to use. The left and right’ll also be useful—actually, never mind, just focus on these four for now…” He explains the buttons as Shigaraki starts setting up the game and finishes with, “You’re gonna suck at it, starting out, but Toga’s not good at it either. It’s why we’re playing Smash, it’s a fun party game even if you aren’t any good. We’ll play timed instead of stock—uh, lives—so you don’t get stuck out of the game partway through, and Shig and I mostly fight each other, so just do what you want, okay?”

Fuyumi nods slowly, chewing her lower lip to one side of the staples running down her chin as she stares up at the screen of characters that Shigaraki’s pulled up. “Which character should I chose?”

“It doesn’t really—“ Spinner starts.

“Kirby,” Shigaraki says without missing a beat.

“Aww, I was gonna play Kirby,” Toga pouts. “We match, we both sort of eat people and mimic them!”

Fuyumi looks over her shoulder to mouth an incredulous what? at Dabi. He waves a careless hand back at her; Kirby’s actually a good matchup for her, and he’s a cute pink thing, Fuyumi will love him.

“You can still play Kirby,” Spinner says. “Just pick a different color.”

Shigaraki shakes his head and navigates over to Peach. Spinner swears under his breath at the choice, but he stays with Inkling. “No, that’ll confuse Ihai,” Shigaraki instructs. “Kirby’s easy, let her have him. You should try diversifying anyway, Toga, you need more practice with the other characters so you can actually try countering.”

“Then I’m picking Pikachu,” Toga decides, “and I’m going to lightning the shit out of you, Shiggy.”

Dabi leans forward for a high-five. Toga bounces over, smacks his hand hard, and bounces right back to Fuyumi to point out who the hell Kirby is, talking a mile a minute about why he’s the best character and how she should try to play him. Fuyumi probably understands less than a tenth of her instructions, but she’ll pick it up quickly enough once they start playing.

Fuyumi dies falling off the edge four times in the first minute. Playing Kirby.

“Ihai, Ihai, just keep pressing up!” Toga encourages her. “He’ll float on his own for a really long time, just make sure you’re over something you can stand on before you let go.”

Fuyumi obligingly floats, but Kirby is caught under the level again. She lasts another three seconds before dying. “Um. I don’t think I’m very good at this.”

“You don’t have to be good, it’s just for fun,” Toga promises her. “Oh, let me show you how to eat people!”

“What?” Fuyumi asks blankly, and yelps when Toga lunges for her controller unexpectedly. “Wait, I thought you were joking! Kirby really eats people? He’s a balloon!”

“He’s a Pink Puff, a sentient balloon-like race from Planet Popstar,” Shigaraki corrects her absently, right before smashing Spinner off the edge of the level and smirking at the stream of swearing that elicits.

“He’s a—there’s a whole planet of cannibalistic balloons? What kind of game is this?”

Toga catches up to her idling Pikachu and elbows Fuyumi. “Hey, watch, you just press B.” Kirby sucks Pikachu into his mouth with an adorably animated gust of wind and waddles slowly back the other way, suddenly twice his previous size.

“Oh my god,” Fuyumi whispers.

“And then you press B again and he swallows!” Fuyumi cringes, then blinks as Pikachu pops out again. Toga hands back her controller and picks up her own. “Now you can eletrocute things with B.”

“…Oh. Pikachu’s okay?” Fuyumi slowly unfreezes, leaning forward to squint harder at the screen. “Does Kirby have a little hat? With the ears? That’s adorable, actually,” she admits. “I get it, with the mimicking—I thought there’d be blood involved.”

“It’s a party game,” Dabi calls to her, incredulous.

“We’re in a villain base! It could have been a villain party game!” Fuyumi defends herself. She bites her lip, jumps around, and immediately falls of the edge. Again. She pouts. “Aw, I didn’t come back with my hat.”

“Here, do your special move on me again,” Toga offers, hopping her Pikachu down to stand in front of Kirby. Fuyumi falteringly brings Kirby closer. “Just press B—“

Kirby pulls out a hammer and knocks Pikachu off the stage. Fuyumi blinks, then frowns down at her controller. “Oops? What did I just press?”

“You were moving left when you pressed B,” Shigaraki tells her. He dodges Toga’s half-hearted attack as she resurrects at the top of the screen, then Spinner’s much more coordinated combo. Peach goes off the edge, but jumps back in a ludicrously dainty series of jumps. “Your joystick has to be in the middle to eat someone. Also, game’s about to end.”

THREE, the game says.

Pikachu calls a lightning strike that knocks him off the edge just as he’s bouncing back. Shigaraki tumbles, goes for the edge—

TWO.

Misses. There’s an explosive animation at the bottom of the screen as he dies.

ONE.

Shigaraki’s face goes blank. Toga’s shit-eating grin only gets wider.

GAME, says the announcer.

“Rematch,” Shigaraki says decisively. “You’re not getting in a single kill with your goddamn Pikachu this time, Toga, you hear me?”

Two games later, Fuyumi has eaten Pikachu several times, gotten knocked off the stage while trying to eat Shigaraki’s Peach, and learned how to turn into a brick—and promptly slid off the edge, since that particular stage had been tilted. Dabi is, somewhere deep down where he doesn’t actually have to admit it, happy to see her having fun.

Especially when Toga pesters Spinner into letting Fuyumi swallow Inkling, so she can see what the little squid hat looks like on Kirby, and then Fuyumi accidentally walks off the edge with Inkling still in Kirby’s mouth and kills them both. Shigaraki laughs, and Dabi joins in only to get a baleful glare from Spinner, but Fuyumi’s apologies—barely audible over Toga’s cackling—make Spinner subside and grumble for a proper rematch.

It’s all fun and games, right up until Toga blasts Fuyumi with a lightning strike as she’s trying to float over Peach long enough to turn into a brick. Kirby goes flying, and Fuyumi shrieks in surprise and dismay.

Which would also be fine, if she didn’t simultaneously set the controller she’s holding on fire.

Dabi lunges forward, quirk reacting on instinct. The controller ices over before it can light anything else on fire—like, say, Fuyumi—but there’s definitely more ice than he intends to make. At least Fuyumi is frost-proof in his body?

Fuyumi peels her fingers away from the controller. There’s scorch marks, but it’s coated lightly by little bits of frost. Some of the plastic’s melted, and the case is warped and popped open. Not a fire hazard, anymore, but clearly ruined.

Pikachu and Kirby idle on the screen as Toga turns to coo over Fuyumi’s hands and the destroyed controller. Spinner and Shigaraki barely even glance over to check no one’s injured before they continue trying to beat the shit out of each other by animated proxy.

“I—oh no,” Fuyumi mutters. She flexes her fingers and Dabi can practically hear the staples in her hands creak, suddenly brittle with cold. “…I didn’t mean to do that.”

“No shit,” Dabi grunts, reaching for her hands. He pulls away the moment they make contact with a hiss; her hands are freezing. “Warm up your hands. Without setting anything on fire,” he specifies. “Rub ‘em together or something—“

“Ow.”

“—while avoiding the staples.”

“Right.” Fuyumi rubs her hands together, just the top half of her palm and her fingers, and gives Dabi a guilty look. “I didn’t mean to set it on fire, I just got surprised. I’m sorry…” She trails off and frowns over at where Shigaraki and Spinner are still watching the screen, unbothered. “Not that any of you seem upset about it?” Despite not being phrased as a question, she certainly says it like one.

Shigaraki shrugs. “You had it handled.”

Fuyumi’s eyes narrow and she cuts a suspicious glance over to Dabi. “Dabi, how many controllers have you destroyed?”

Spinner’s character is catapulted off the stage just before the timer sounds, but he’s laughing. “Four!”

“Two,” Dabi snaps.

“You’ve set four on fire!”

“And Handjob disintegrated two of them—“

“Because you set them on fire,” Shigaraki interjects.

Dabi scoffs. Fuyumi’s smirking at him now; thanks, assholes. “Okay, but we all know that Shigaraki destroys way more controllers than I do.”

“Does that mean all the dust in the living room is furniture and game controllers, not people?” Fuyumi asks hopefully.

Dabi facepalms, but that doesn’t block out the sound of Toga snickering. He’s going to need to pull Fuyumi aside very soon and explain what exactly they do as villains and in their downtime.

“Probably,” Shigaraki says, sulkily.

“Wait, wait, everbody wait!” Toga exclaims. Spinner jumps and glares grumpily, but Shigaraki just gives her an expectant look. “That was clue number three! Ihai has an ice quirk.”

Fuyumi slowly turns to look at Dabi, who glowers back. “Shut up, I had to stop you from setting yourself on fire.”

“Right,” Fuyumi says with an impressively blank expression. “There’s definitely no one else who could have prevented a fire from spreading from the controller, especially not someone who’s done it before—“

Dabi throws the ruined controller at her. Fuyumi yelps, recoils, and sparks blue flames. So of course, Dabi has to lunge after her to start this farce all over again, despite Spinner snickering at him from the safety of the other side of Shigaraki.

Chapter Text

“Hey, Dabi,” Toga asks, in the thoughtful sort of tone that tends to stir way more shit than when she actually does it on purpose. She’s sitting on the couch upside-down, her feet thumping rhythmically against the back of it, and Dabi’s about ten seconds from giving into his big brother instinct and telling her to change out of her skirt or at least pay enough attention to make sure it doesn’t slip any more than it already has. “If your sister is so awesome, how come you ran away from home?”

“Yeah!” Twice interjects. “That’s a good question. None of us want to know. Ihai’s so nice, how come you didn’t tell her you were leaving or anything? It’s no surprise you wanted to get the fuck away from her.”

Dabi shifts where he’s leaning against the wall, abruptly uncomfortable, but he’d choke and die before admitting it. “That’s identifying information, idiots,” he drawls. He sort of regrets not following Shigaraki and Compress out back to argue about boring budget shit, or Fuyumi into the kitchen to check on the mochi. He almost wishes Fuyumi was here, but there’s no guarantee she’d actually help him avoid this question—she doesn’t know the answer either, after all. He hasn’t told her most of the story, hasn’t been able to get the damn words out. He sure as hell isn’t telling the League first.

“It’s not like you being a cagey asshole is new,” Spinner retorts. “Just… why did she think you were dead? She seems really cool, it must have sucked to feel left behind like that.”

Oh, of course. Not only did Fuyumi somehow get Spinner to like her when Dabi looked away for two fucking seconds, but now it’s making him even more annoying. “I don’t see why it’s any of your fucking business, lizard.”

“Are we interrogating him now?” Shigaraki says, and Dabi turns sharply to see him come through the back door, Compress behind him. “What the fuck for?”

Toga jumps to volunteer, “He won’t tell us why he ran away from Ihai! And they were whisper-arguing about it this morning. We have to fix it!”

“You can’t fix it,” Dabi snaps. “Why were you even listening?”

“You left the kitchen door wide open, you can’t complain about that,” Toga objects. “Did you run away because you have daddy issues?”

“That conversation wasn’t intended for your gremlin ears, you little shit.” Dabi ignores her second question entirely—first of all, he wants the man dead, it isn’t something to be brushed off as lightly as ‘daddy issues,’ and second of all, he’d rather keep the entire League approximately six light-years from that whole slow-building disaster. Nobody needs to get involved in his fights, thank you very much.

Shigaraki claps his hands together and puts on that stupid level tone of voice he uses when he’s pretending to be a semi-functional adult. “Well, we can talk about it. Maybe we can at least fix the reason you couldn’t contact her, Dabi. Was it your dad? If you need him killed, we can totally have him killed for you.”

“You don’t know anything about the situation,” Dabi says loudly. His skin prickles; he knows anything less than a straight no is an admission of it’s own. His heartbeat is speeding up, too loud in his ears, reacting to the thought of any of them interfering in this battle that’s his and his alone.

(At the thought of any of them falling into his reach—)

“Really?” Shigaraki says doubtfully. “Because it’s pretty obvious you and Ihai don’t like your dad—“

“Leave it.”

Compress steps in smoothly, graciously. “Now, now, let us help you, Dabi. It’s not as though any of us are going to judge you for having been a teenage runaway!“

“I wasn’t a damn runaway,” Dabi spits.

“As I said, this is a shame-free zone—“

The words tear themselves out of his throat before Dabi can stop them: “I was fucking murdered!”

He’s shaking. It’s probably the cold, more than anything—Fuyumi’s quirk has escaped his control. He can feel frost on his lips for a moment before they go entirely numb, and the medical mask burns stiff and cold against his skin; the room has dropped several degrees not just figuratively but literally. It needles at his skin, strange and foreign; he reflexively draws his arms closer for warmth, but he doesn’t dare fold them. Doesn’t dare show that sort of weakness when he’s already bared too much.

Toga slowly flips upright. She shivers, her breath fogging in the air in front of her. “But… you’re right here.”

Dabi wishes he hadn’t said anything. But that’s not an option, now. “I. Did not. Fake my death. On purpose,” he grits out.

“Your dad hurt you?” Toga says, very quiet. Her expression is sharp and haunted; she knows altogether too much about fathers hurting their children. Dabi has to look away.

Shigaraki’s watching him intently, arms folded. Dabi doesn’t like the look in his eyes, glittering and razor-edged like he’s about to rip something open. “You didn’t give yourself those scars, did you?”

Dabi wants to snipe at all of them like this is just their average Tuesday. Ask them why the fuck they think he would have given himself these scars, or dismissively tell them that of course he did—but neither answer would be true, because none of it’s that clear-cut. Dabi burned alive and no one involved was picky about how. He wishes he could light himself on fire again, right this second, just to escape this fucking conversation. Just to chase away the cold—

“Please don’t antagonize him about our history,” Fuyumi says quietly, one hand still braced on the kitchen door. “It’s painful for both of us, and we’d appreciate the space to work through it privately.”

Dabi can finally see why Fuyumi takes such measure to be so cripplingly polite: absolutely no one in the League can meet her eyes after that. Dabi takes the escape with the bitter taste of shame still in his mouth, but all he wants is to get out of this fucking room.

Fuyumi stops him with a gentle hand on his arm as soon as he clears the kitchen doorway, closing the door behind him. “What do you mean, you didn’t fake your death on purpose?” she murmurs.

He was trying to kill me, Dabi doesn’t say. He wonders how his scars would be throbbing, if he were wearing them.

“Nurse did it,” he tells her shortly, a clean, sterilized nugget of truth, and shrugs her hand off his arm to stalk toward the dining room for some goddamn peace and quiet.

Dabi gets a grand total of thirty seconds alone to compose himself before the door the dining room opens again—but it’s only Fuyumi. She comes in, sits next to him quietly, and Dabi braces himself for another fucking conversation, but she doesn’t try to ask anymore questions. The two of them sit for a precious twenty minutes in absolute silence save for the quiet murmur of some sort of discussion happening out in the living room. Dabi debates the merits of risking the walk through the living room to barricade himself in his room for the rest of the day. He’ll even be nice about it and drag Fuyumi with him, if she keeps it up with the quiet game.

Before he can fully weight the pros and cons of making a break for it, Compress marches in cheerily, his mask a geometric approximation of a wide smile. He takes a seat across from the two of them and folds his hands on the table like he’s about to make a presentation.

He doesn’t immediately launch into whatever he came here to say, which Dabi knows from an unfortunate amount of personal experience means he can and will wait here for a solid hour until one of them gives him the response he’s looking for. Dabi grits his teeth, but there’s nothing for it. “What the fuck are you doing here?” he asks, resigned.

“I’m on conflict resolution duty,” Compress informs his brightly.

Dabi looks suspiciously toward the doorway Compress came from. Shigaraki steps out of sight embarrassingly slowly for a man who’s supposed to be a dangerous villain. “Are you shitting me? You assholes are the conflict.” Dabi makes sure to say that loudly enough that Shigaraki can’t miss it.

“Well,” Compress says in that tone that means he’s going to argue even though he’s wrong, “you two have started arguing with each other twice independently, so perhaps my services would be useful.”

“Ihai, set him on fire,” Dabi orders.

Fuyumi doesn’t look up from where she’s picking at her black nail polish. “Say please.”

Compress tilts his head just slightly. Dabi can feel the smug smile. “See? Conflict resolution. So, Dabi, how do you feel—“

“Ihai, please set him on fire.”

Compress pauses, wary. Fuyumi looks up at the ceiling, clearly thinking the request over, before obligingly summoning a blue fireball over one hand. “Just his top hat, or…?”

The chair clatters as Compress practically leaps out of his seat, belatedly trying to make it look suave instead of panicked. He has a hand protectively over his top hat, but it slips down to hold the brim in an elongated sort of hat tip. He coughs. “Now, now, let’s not be hasty!”

Fuyumi looks thoughtfully between Compress and the fireball. “Dabi, can you throw fire? What happens if you miss?” Her tone is deliberately innocent. Dabi knows she wouldn’t actually do it in a million years, but Compress doesn’t, and that she’s willing to play along is enough to make Dabi grin, sharp and feral.

Compress vanishes out the door like the hounds of Hell are chasing him and his top hat. Dabi leans forward to call after him, “Stop meddling, you assholes!”

“Just tell us your name already so we can find your dad and murder him for you!” Shigaraki calls back.

“No!”

Dabi settles back into his chair with a huff. This conversation is over, no matter what Shigaraki’s obvious continued lurking has to say on the matter. Strangely, though, Dabi does feel a little lighter than he did after his accidental confession. He shrugs it off; threatening someone with fire has always been a pretty quick pick-me-up for him.

Then he catches the look on Fuyumi’s face, and he tenses. She’s thoughtful, and the way her lips are pressed together means she’s trying not to smile. Dabi compulsively looks behind himself, then up at the ceiling, for some sort of prank. He doesn’t find anything, which only means whatever it is hasn’t shown itself yet, and that’s worse.

“That’s… touching,” Fuyumi says slowly. “You know, in a murderous, villainous sort of way.”

Dabi eyes her like she’s grown a second head. “What? No it isn’t.”

“Yes it is!” Toga calls, and oh fuck, Dabi must have missed her earlier, crouching behind the doorframe. To be fair, Shigaraki makes for a good distraction, and she’s a lot better at hiding than he is. “We’re family, and families that murder together stay together!”

“We’re a team,” Shigaraki corrects her severely. “…But murder makes for a good team bonding experience, so we’re doing it. Give us a name, and that’s an order, Dabi.”

“Fuck off, Handjob, I don’t take orders from you,” Dabi scoffs.

“I’m your boss, yes you do.”

“I really don’t, though.”

“Just let us murder your dad already—“

Dabi risks a glance at Fuyumi. She seems to have been holding up despite the whole villain business mostly by doing her utmost to pretend it isn’t happening—not that that’s worked out for her particularly well—but a blunt conversation about murder seems like the sort of thing that could freak her out.

Fuyumi is not freaking out. He would almost prefer she were, instead of this alternative, which is: she looks like she’s about to laugh. Specifically at him. “What?” he demands aggressively.

Fuyumi glances toward the doorway and Shigaraki. Then back at Dabi. Her mouth quirks up into a tiny smirk. “Awwww.”

Dabi gives her a dirty look and shoves her lightly in the shoulder.

This only serves to set her off. Fuyumi crumples into semi-hysterical, helpless laughter, gasping for the breath to form words. “Oh my god, you’re—you’re a murder family, what the hell.”

“Murder team!” Shigaraki corrects indignantly, while Dabi’s still trying to pick his jaw up off the floor after that blatant misinterpretation of the situation.

“Murder nothing!” Dabi retorts. “I am a murder individual, and you are all acquaintances that are not invited to murder with me, dammit!”

A real fucking suspicious top hat peeks out from behind Shigaraki, then Compress’s stupid smiling mask. “Ah, this looks like a situation that might need a little conflict resolution—“

“Fuck off,” Dabi and Shigaraki bark simultaneously.

“Pssst, Ihai.” Dabi snaps toward the other side of the table, where somehow Toga has snuck around to stage whisper at Fuyumi. “Will you tell me? Please? I promise I’ll stab your dad a lot!”

“No, I won’t,” Fuyumi says with an admirable lack of panic. “I don’t believe in murder as a solution to interpersonal problems.”

Shigaraki actually steps into the dining room just to frown at Fuyumi more effectively. “What the hell do you do, then?”

Fuyumi slides a sideways glance at Dabi, and he gets that sixth-sense sort of feeling that he’s going to want to strangle someone for the next words out of her mouth. Then Fuyumi looks Shigaraki straight in the eye and deadpans, “Conflict resolution.”

Dabi stands up abruptly, chair screeching against the floor like the wailing in his soul. “I’m leaving.”

Chapter Text

Fuyumi isn’t sure how to feel about the frequency at which she’s being abandoned in the middle of a villain base by her twin, but she can’t bring herself to be too concerned about it at the moment. It’s probably the absurdity of the situation getting to her.

It doesn’t help that when Shigaraki watches Dabi leave, he barely pauses for a handful of seconds before walking in and sitting down across the table from her. “How do I convince you to tell me who your dad is so we can murder him?”

Fuyumi blinks. “…Not like that?”

Shigaraki blinks back at her. She has no idea what sort of answer he expected to get from that, but it clearly wasn’t this; he looks entirely stumped.

Fuyumi’s a little incredulous at how easy it apparently is to put him at a loss for words, but that’s the only answer she really has to give him, since she doesn’t know how he would ever be able to convince her either. She goes back to picking at her nail polish as the stilted silence stretches. A third of the polish is already gone, but as nervous tics go, this is miles better than picking at her staples like she’s been tempted to do when they ache—which is all the time.

Shigaraki’s eyebrows are scrunched together, his eyes narrowed. “…But how would I convince you?”

Fuyumi flicks another speck of nail polish off and scrutinizes him. “Why do you even want to know?” she asks, honestly curious.

“I told you, we’re going to murder—“

“That’s what Dabi wants to do.” Which she and her twin are going to need to have a discussion about at some point, preferably when she has some backup that won’t fall solidly into the murder is okay camp. “Why do you want to do that?”

Shigaraki blinks at her again, no more comprehending than he was the first time. “Dabi’s one of us,” he says, like it’s something as obvious as the sky being blue, like looking out the window is enough to know. “We protect our own.” He’s dead serious, and the most confident Fuyumi has seen him yet—he really means it.

…She’d been joking about the murder family thing, dammit.

Mostly. Sort of.

Anyway.

“I’m not going to help you murder my dad,” Fuyumi says slowly. That’s not a phrase she ever thought she’d need in her vocabulary. “I believe in things like jail time and the law instead of defaulting straight to murder.”

Shigaraki opens his mouth.

“But!” Fuyumi interjects, because she gets the feeling she’s going to get really sick of having this argument with a group of card-carrying villains really fast if she lets it gain any actual traction. “I would love to know how your fam—team. How your team works.” She almost tries to smile, remembers what face she’s wearing, and tones it down to an attentive look. “You’re in charge, right?”

“Yeah.” Shigaraki eyes her like he thinks she’s going to argue with him. Fuyumi has no intention of arguing; she just recognizes a prime opportunity to get some intel on who’s looking out for her brother while said brother isn’t around to scoff, roll his eyes at her, and generally make himself a nuisance.

“So,” Fuyumi stays, folding her hands together on the table and trying to look professional despite the staples and general edge lord aesthetic. Actually, do villains consider Dabi’s aesthetic to be a professional look? She both hopes so and really hopes not. “Tell me about yourself and what you do.”

After about two minutes of listening to Shigaraki try to answer those two questions, Fuyumi mentally starts filling in the blanks for him: he has no idea what the hell he’s doing and possibly has only a shaky grasp on who he really is. She interrupts exactly once to ask him how old he is, and his answer surprises her not at all—he’s got all the makings of a twenty-one-year-old disaster.

To be fair, from the sound of it, Shigaraki did not originally do all of the… villain things that the League of Villains does. That was his Sensei, aka All for One, aka the villain that All Might crippled himself to bring down. Then someone named Kurogiri got locked up, who was the League’s teleporter and also possibly Shigaraki’s father. …Adopted father? Or maybe just his father figure? Fuyumi is a little unclear on that, but every polite question she tried to ask to shed a little more light on the topic was met with candid answers that only made her more confused. He almost sounds like he was some sort of nanny, but that just can’t be right.

Fuyumi honestly isn’t sure why anyone left Shigaraki in charge of this operation, but she’s not feeling nearly rude enough to ask outright. What she also doesn’t know—and finds much more confusing—is why she’s suddenly having the urge to get him a blanket and maybe a book on parenting teenagers, since he’s spent the last several minutes after Fuyumi stopped asking questions ranting about how difficult it is to convince Toga that she shouldn’t put random things or people in her mouth.

…Actually, he might need a book on parenting toddlers, for that.

“Thank you, that was very enlightening,” Fuyumi says brightly. It’s not a lie; it’s an exaggeration at worst. She did get a couple questions answers, and if she now has about a hundred more, well, that’s just going to need at least one other conversation to work through. Later. Much later, hopefully.

As long as she can escape this conversation, first. But that’s the easy part—Shigaraki is only a little older than Natsuo, and she’s never seen her little brother turn down food he didn’t have to make.

“The mochi should be well-set by now. Do you want some?”

Shigaraki doesn’t even try to help her get the mochi out of the freezer, but Fuyumi has to admit that his quirk doesn’t exactly lend itself to easily helping in the kitchen, and he waits for her patiently enough. Fuyumi pokes her head out of the kitchen to call out that there’s mochi is anyone wants some, and Himiko bolts in to snatch a green tea mochi out from under Shigaraki’s fingers.

“Mmmm, these are really good, Ihai!” Himiko tells her cheerfully, ignoring the irritated look Shigaraki gives her as he carefully picks out a different mochi. Himiko pulls a paper plate out of the cupboard and starts neatly arranging mochi in circles.

“Thank you, Himiko.” She eyes the plate and its slowly growing pile. “…Are you going somewhere with those?”

Himiko beams as she picks up the plate, now laden with mochi. “I’m taking some to Twice, he’s busy.”

“Oh, that’s nice of you.”

Fuyumi doesn’t think anything else of it as Himiko escapes the kitchen with her spoils, until she turns around and finds Shigaraki staring after her with his eyes narrowed in either curiosity or suspicion. “Huh,” he says, and offers no explanation before snatching up a second mochi and following her out of the kitchen.

Fuyumi spends a solid ten seconds staring blankly at the door, debating over exactly how much she should be worrying about that, before Dabi distracts her by sauntering in.

“Decided you want desert before lunch?”

“I’m avoiding the absolute lack of logic and reason in this place by feeding everyone,” Fuyumi tells him brightly. She holds out a strawberry mochi to him.

Dabi squints at her and takes a breath like he’s going to ask, but he clearly decides against it. He simply shakes his head as he takes the mochi from her. “You realize that’s just going to make them hang around you more?” he asks.

He takes a casual bite straight through the middle of the mochi, because he’s always found such joy in making Fuyumi cringe just by the way he eats ice cream. She starts to roll her eyes, but then Dabi stiffens up with a muffled sound, clapping a hand over his mouth and gagging. He stumbles to the sink and spits the mochi out.

Fuyumi’s still warring between worry and offense when Dabi wheezes out, “My. Teeth.”

“Oh, I’m the cold proof one right now,” Fuyumi realizes, awed. She snatches up one of the green tea mochi and bites into it with abandon. No sensitive teeth, and no brain freeze. The ice cream itself tastes strange somehow, like the cold had been an added flavor somehow, but it’s still creamy and good, and her tongue isn’t even going to go numb.

“Are you just going to keep eating while I’m dying over here?” Dabi demands.

Fuyumi considers that. “Well, you turned up alive the last time I thought you were dead?”

Dabi’s garbled snarl makes Fuyumi double check the switch near the sink to make sure the garbage disposal hasn’t suddenly turned on.

“Just be a little more careful when you’re eating cold food,” she offers. “Your teeth will be fine in another minute if they aren’t fine already, stop being a baby.”

Dabi growls low in his throat.

Fuyumi rolls her eyes and leans over to pat him on the head. “…If you’re not going to finish your mochi, can I—“

Dabi throws the half-eaten mochi at her, but Fuyumi catches it, so it’s all a win in the end.

When Twice comes into the kitchen, Fuyumi smiles and opens her mouth to ask how he liked the mochi, but he doesn’t pause for a second before shuffling her and Dabi both out into the living room and onto the couch. Spinner startles and pulls his feet closer to himself before Fuyumi can accidentally sit on them.

"The mochi were really good, Ihai! They were awful," Twice calls, already back inside the kitchen. “Stay there for the presentation, I’ll put the rest back in the freezer for you!” 

…Presentation? Fuyumi is now officially concerned. She shares a long glance with Dabi, who looks like he’s already calculating how best to set the room on fire without blocking any exits.

Himiko marches into the room with a wide smile and a whiteboard almost as tall as she is, propping it up against their TV. It’s blank, but Himiko is holding a marker. Fuyumi has only been around to witness the slowly spinning disaster of this group, but even she feels the same twinge of foreboding she sees reflected on the faces around her.

Fuyumi bites the bullet. “What’s that, Himiko?”

Himiko springs to her tip-toes, straight-backed and almost vibrating with excitement. “This!” She smacks the whiteboard hard with the red marker in her hand. “Is my conspiracy board! Except I don’t have any actual theories yet, so this is currently my clue board!”

“It’s blank,” Dabi deadpans.

“I’m getting to that part!” Himiko spins around and shuffles over so she can start writing; even leaning slightly back against the TV to keep it from falling over, the white board is tall enough that she barely has to crouch until the fourth line, despite how big and cutesy her handwriting is.

Spinner leans far over to the side to squint around Toga’s body blocking most of the board. “You mixed up the first two, we figured out the second one first.”

“I already wrote them down, though,” Himiko pouts. “Rewriting it’ll take forever.”

“I’m just saying, the order’s going to be wrong.”

Himiko sticks her tongue out at him, but she turns back lightning quick and scrubs off the start of the line with her fingers before rewriting the numbers. “There, I’m leaving it like that.”

Fuyumi can just make out the end of the first line above Himiko’s shoulder, and does that say fireproof? Slowly, suspiciously, she says, “Himiko?”

Himiko shushes her. “I only have two more, wait juuuuust a minute…”

Then, with a flourish, she steps away to reveal exactly what sort of clues she’s been writing. Fuyumi’s stomach sinks. Himiko beams. “I am now taking suggestions!”

Toga’s Conspiracy Board

2. Ihai is fireproof
1. Ihai’s hair is dyed (what color is it?) (is Dabi’s hair really black???)
3. Dabi is older by a few minutes
4. They have Dady Issues (especially Dabi)
5. They have two younger siblings (5 and 9 a while ago?) (how old are Dabi and Ihai???)
6. Ihai has an ice quirk
7. Dabi was murdered by his dad (LOTS of daddy issues)

“You have gotta be fucking kidding me,” Dabi says flatly.

“That’s not a suggestion,” Himiko informs him brightly.

“Here’s a suggestion: get rid of it or I’m setting it on fire.”

Himiko shushes him impatiently. “Stop threatening my conspiracy board! You don’t even have a fire quirk right now.”

“I can get a lighter.”

“Or he can ask me,” Fuyumi puts in warningly. “I’m not going to light a person on fire, but I could be convinced for property damage if it’s for a good cause.”

Dabi snorts. “We’ll corrupt you yet.” Fuyumi smacks him lightly on the shoulder.

“But Ihai,” Himiko whines.

“No,” Fuyumi says firmly. Himiko’s puppy eyes are very good, but they won’t work on her—she spends her days around a pack of eight-year-olds, and they are much better at weaponizing their cuteness.

Himiko turns to Dabi without missing a beat. “But—“

“Fuck no.”

Himiko wavers, giving her ‘conspiracy board’ a forlorn look. “…But I just wrote all the clues down.”

“You know, two out of seven clues is kind of a lot for daddy issues coming through,” Spinner says thoughtfully, still squinting at the clues.

Shigaraki’s voice floats over their heads, making Fuyumi jump: “That’s why we’re going to murder their dad!”

Dabi swears, boosting himself up with a knee on the cushion to look over the back of the couch. “Why the fuck are you lurking like a creepy stalker, Handjob?”

“Because stalkers get information,” Shigaraki insists. “Himiko, the board stays up.”

Himiko cheers. Fuyumi can hear Dabi’s teeth grinding, and maybe she’s a little nervous about actually intruding on the frankly absurd dynamic here, but—she’s Dabi’s twin, she’s allowed to provide some backup.

And Shigaraki could probably use all the clues she can smack him over the head with.

“Team bonding requires everyone on the team actually agreeing with the direction the team is going in,” Fuyumi says firmly. “If you want it to be a good experience, you need to wait until the whole team is on board with it.” She nods significantly toward Dabi.

Shigaraki’s eyes narrow. “But you’re a civilian, so you wouldn’t ever actually agree.”

“I’m not part of your team, so you don’t need to care my opinion. But Dabi is, and he’s…” Fuyumi glances at Dabi, realizes that’s not going to help, and guesses: “He’s normally okay with murder, I presume, and he hasn’t agreed to this either.”

Dabi is giving her his most severe Fuyumi what the fuck are you doing face. It’s very nostalgic; Fuyumi deliberately ignores him, which is also very nostalgic. Shigaraki turns to give Dabi a considering look and his expression smoothes out into something unbothered and bored in under a second. “Yeah, asshole, I didn’t agree to this shit. I’ll handle it on my own.”

Shigaraki frowns, not quite convinced. “But we’re your team. We’re supposed to help.”

“And you’ve offered to!” Fuyumi agrees quickly, before Dabi can say something rude and undo her tentative progress. “So if Dabi does decide he would rather not do it on his own, I’m sure he’ll ask you for help.” She isn’t sure of that at all, actually, because if there’s one thing the Todoroki children have learned to hard way, it’s how to be self-sufficient. But she is sure that if the League doesn’t drop the subject, Dabi really is going to figure out how to commit arson the quirkless way.

Shigaraki visibly mulls that over. Fuyumi has to kick Dabi in the ankle twice to stop him from interrupting the internal debate taking place.

“Fine,” Shigaraki concedes finally. He sounds sulky about it, but sincere enough. “Dabi, when you’re ready, we’ll totally help you murder your dirtbag of a dad.”

“What the fuck ever, just get off my case about it.”

Shigaraki nods like this is the best possible response he could have expected. “Toga, clean off the whiteboard. Twice, you’re not going to need all that red string.”

There’s a quiet awww from down the hallway, and Dabi pinches the bridge of his nose, visibly praying for patience. Shigaraki leaves again—hopefully for real this time—and Himiko picks up a tissue to start wiping off the board with the excruciating slowness of a child who wants it widely known that they are only obeying under duress.

Dabi cranes his head around to make sure Shigaraki actually goes before turning back to Fuyumi. “How in the fuck.”

Fuyumi shrugs. She doesn’t know how to explain the delicately balanced social mess that is Shigaraki if Dabi hasn’t noticed by now. “I guess I picked up some interpersonal skills from work?”

Himiko’s head jerks up like a bloodhound that’s just caught a scent. “Clue number eight! Arguing with Shigaraki reminds Ihai of her work!”

There’s a beat of absolute silence as Fuyumi processes that—her work involves thirty eight-year-olds, comparing that to talking to the leader of the League of villains is both unwise and unfair, though who it’s unfair to she’s not quite sure. She scrambles to find her voice, to protest because she didn’t mean that, and makes the mistake of meeting Dabi’s startled eyes for a fraction of a second.

“Wait, that—that’s not what I said!”

Himiko probably can’t hear her, though, over the Dabi’s peals of maniacal laughter.

Chapter Text

Late afternoon finds Dabi hiding his room and seriously starting to consider the merits of locking the door. The only issue is that he would, in practicality, have to hide Fuyumi in here with him, and that pressure kettle combined with the insatiable curiosity of every other asshole in residence would be a disaster. The showy, inevitable kind of disaster, where people cook up popcorn to watch and pretend it’s fireworks.

Better to let them play off of each other and keep the focus off of the things he’d rather stay buried. He can’t make the League forget that he has a twin, can’t make them stop wondering what the family they didn’t know existed must be like, but that doesn’t mean he has to give them any more clues.

There’s a brush of wind he can feel against his unusually long hair. Just a bit of a breeze, but Dabi knows he’d left the window closed.

“Wow, it’s weird being taller than you, hot stuff,” Hawks teases from right behind him, and Dabi turns on his heel on instinct to punch the asshole in the shoulder.

Hawks catches his fist easily and tugs Dabi closer with a grin. Dabi glares even as he staggers forward a step. “I might not be able to burn you right now, but I can still do some damage, you motherfucker.”

Hawks laughs. It’s a softer laugh than he used to give Dabi, lacking both the laser-sharp edge his eyes get when he’s pretending to be a villain and the plastic shell of the laugh he gives the public. It’s nice, knowing Hawks feels like he can let down his guard down around Dabi by even a fraction of an inch. “Did I do something? Or are you just mad I snuck up on you?”

Ugh, Hawks is not allowed to give him emotions. What they have doesn’t involve emotions. Especially now, when Fuyumi is here to read him like an open book and make fun of him like she did over Toga’s video yesterday—

And especially not when Dabi is currently wearing her body. He suppresses the full-body shudder that realization generates, but Hawks is still holding his hand—his fist, holding his fist, and Dabi’s brain refuses to generate a more nuanced reaction to that other than a grinding hrkkkk.

Hawks goes to pull him closer, wearing that sly smirk that, at any other time, would give Dabi a hard time deciding between punching him and kissing him, but right now that scale is tipped extremely hard toward punching him because—“I’m in my sister’s body, dipshit, don’t even think of trying anything.”

Hawks lets him go in a flash, recoiling. Dabi gets the dubious pleasure of watching the feathered idiot’s expression go through all five stages of grief in under three seconds. “I wasn’t—! Oh, ew.” He turns to the side and leans over, making exaggerated gagging sounds. “That was really not my intent, and also, fuck you for putting that image in my brain.”

Ew doesn’t even begin to cover it. And Hawks is the one who grabbed him, so really, he’s the one responsible for putting that image in Dabi’s head. Therefore, he deserves to suffer a little more, just to match Dabi’s misfortune. Mercilessly, Dabi says, “If you, at any point in the last twenty-four hours, have even thought the words ‘ooh, twins,’ I’m leaving your body in a dumpster.”

Hawks claps his hands over his ears and staggers back against the window sill like he’s been physically wounded. “Bleach. Oh my god, you owe me so much brain bleach, you fucking asshole.”

Dabi grins, suddenly feeling much better about the situation. He grabs Hawks by the jacket and hauls him, unresisting, to throw open the door to his bedroom and call out to the rest of the house, “Birdbrain’s back!” There. Conversation is officially over and he has no intention of allowing it to come up again at all, ever, for the rest of the week or he’s stabbing someone in the kidneys. Hawks who? Dabi has never seen anyone naked in his life.

The living room is partially full and starting to fill up more after his announcement; Dabi shoves Hawks inside as a sacrifice to the overly curious piranhas lying in wait for him.

Toga gasps on cue and launches herself at Hawks, clinging to him. Dabi rolls his eyes; she’s blocking the way into the room now, at least until Hawks awkwardly shuffles sideways with her hanging off his arm like a limpet, but of course she doesn’t care. “Hawks! There’s no meeting, did you come to hang out with us?”

Hawks laughs and ruffles her hair. “Of course! Also, Dabi said he and Ihai’d be swapped the whole week, I have to witness this train wreck.”

“Ass,” Dabi mutters. Halfway across the room, Fuyumi meets his eyes with a single raised eyebrow, and he looks away—yeah, so Dabi might be staring at said ass, but who could fucking blame him.

“Yeah, it’s gonna be great!” Toga enthuses, bouncing up and down and jerking Hawk’s arm with her. “It has been great! We had mochi for lunch and Ihai played Smash with us!”

“I’m glad you’ve been having fun, Himiko” Fuyumi says lightly, looking at Hawks like she doesn’t know whether to chase him away with a stick or offer him cookies. Dabi is not privy to whatever the hell is going through her head and he doesn’t really want to be, but he kind of wishes he’d asked what she thinks of Hawks last night when they were alone for a bit.

…Of course, she probably would have taken that very differently than he intended it, but there’s at least the possibility that it would have been worth the humiliation for a heads up.

“I have! Oh, and I wish I had my conspiracy board, but that’s okay, I’ll just tell you all the new clues!”

“You’ll what?” Dabi asks incredulously, in tandem with Fuyumi. Toga knows he’s a double agent, what the fuck?

“They’ve been chatty?” Hawks prompts, sending a teasing glance to Dabi like he thinks he’s going to get anything but a furious glare back.

Toga ignores Dabi and Fuyumi’s protest and starts chattering away in an impressive lack of common sense. “Well, yesterday you heard that Ihai’s fireproof and that her hair is dyed right now, and that Dabi’s the older twin, and I guess you probably already know that Dabi has daddy issues! Ihai has those too, just less, I think. But, we figured out that they have two younger siblings, not just the brother Ihai was with when they swapped,” Toga continues.

Oh, god, she’s really going through all of her stupid clues. “Don’t tell him any of that, you gremlin,” Dabi sighs, aggrieved. “You had to get rid of your fucking conspiracy board for a reason.”

Toga pouts. “I’m your little sister, you should be nicer to me.”

“You really aren’t.”

“Ihai said I could be her little sister, and that means I’m also yours. Hah!” Toga grins at him smugly.

Dabi shoots a narrow-eyed look at Fuyumi. “Oh? When did that happen?”

Fuyumi grimaces and holds her hands up in a lackluster defense. “I panicked.” She gestures to Toga. “And, come on, Himiko’s adorable, what else was I supposed to say?”

Obligingly, Toga turns on her puppy eyes. Dabi twitches and glares harder at Fuyumi. “At least don’t call her Himiko. You have to uphold some sort of reputation if you’re looking like me.”

“Why should I?” Ihai demands bitchily, folding her arms. “I don’t want yours.”

“Oh, and Ihai has an ice quirk!” Toga confides to Hawks.

Hawks laughs, whether at Toga’s enthusiasm or at them, Dabi isn’t sure. “Wow, it’s weird how much they match.”

“We’re twins, dumbass,” Dabi drawls. He tries not to look too obviously at Fuyumi, who looks like her soul just left her body. He wishes those stupid trash novel tropes of twin telepathy were true, if only so he could tell her to act chill instead of visibly sweating bullets. He thought she’d act less weird around Hawks after finding out he isn’t actually a villain, not more.

He needs a distraction. Not just from Fuyumi, but to keep Hawks from catching on that the ice thing might be important.

“It’s really literary, actually,” Spinner offers. “You two kind of sound like that one Robert Frost poem.”

Dabi scoffs. “Well fuck, you’re a regular scholar. Did you actually finish high school? Nerd.”

Spinner sputters in offense. Fuyumi gives him that disappointed glower he knows so well. “Dabi,” she chides, “how is finishing high school enough to make someone a nerd?” But her voice is pure exasperation instead of whatever panic she was experiencing. Distraction: accomplished.

That little glow of victory lasts all of a second and a half before Toga blurts, “And Dabi got murdered by his dad!”

Hawks snaps to attention. It’s easy to forget his quirk is a mutation of a bird of prey, but now he’s all raptor, preternaturally still with his golden eyes fixed on Toga. “He what.”

Dabi can’t even speak through his immediate rage. That’s definitely going to take Hawks’ mind off of the ice quirk thing, but that is not something he wants Hawks to know. Hawks’ loyalty isn’t to them—isn’t to Dabi—and he knows damn well Hawks thinks the sun shines out of Endeavor’s ass.

All the performative anger in the world doesn’t mean Hawks would lift a finger if he knew the truth. The righteous fury on Hawks’ face is striking, but that doesn’t make it real.

“Yeah, his scars—“

“Toga, shut the fuck up.” Dabi’s ears are buzzing too loudly to be able to tell how incandescently angry he sounds right now, but Toga’s jaw snaps shut so fast he can hear her teeth clack together.

“We’re murdering his dad as soon as he tells us who he is,” Shigaraki puts in. Fuyumi gives Shigaraki a reproachful look; Shigaraki blinks at her and clumsily tacks on, “And after Dabi agrees to let us.”

“I’m down,” Hawks says immediately. He looks Dabi right in the eye. “Gimme a name and I can find his current address.”

Dabi opens his mouth to tell him to fuck off, but he stops cold. He’s suddenly desperate to know what Hawks’ face would look like if Dabi told him the truth, right here, right now. It’s the most tempted he’s been to reveal his identity since this whole farce started, and Hawk can clearly see that, because his gaze sharpens into a fucking challenge.

But—Fuyumi is here, and Dabi doesn’t know what side she would take. She might think Shigaraki’s insistence on team bonding his hilarious, or maybe just absurd, but she’s a civilian. She’s never been in the sort of life-or-death battles that the League not only participates in but starts, and she’s never actually seen any of them kill someone.

Dabi doesn’t know if Fuyumi could stomach letting them kill Endeavor, no matter how much he fucking deserves it, and Dabi knows that he in turn could never stomach doing what he would have to do to stop her if she decided to do something about it.

“As fucking if. I can do it myself.”

“It’s team bonding,” Shigaraki says, exasperated.

“The family that murders together—“

“You’re still not my little sister, Toga,” Dabi snaps.

Yesterday at the dinner table, it’d seemed so simple, learning that Hawks is just a double agent. Funny, like a game. It occurs to Fuyumi much later than it probably should have that, if this is a game, she has no idea what sort of stakes Hawks is playing for, and she doesn’t know the rules.

He isn’t a villain, but he’s pretending to be. How far does that pretending go? How far does a joke go? She watches the bickering and, with a sinking feeling deep in her gut, starts to realize that in a group like this, the line between a joke about murder and premeditated first degree has about the width and visibility of fishing line.

Because she saw Dabi waver, just now—saw him almost give up their identities just so Hawks would have to face the truth about Endeavor and throw in on one side or the other, just because Dabi wants Endeavor dead.

Fuyumi already sort of knew, abstractly, that Dabi has killed people and is deliberately planning to kill more. It’s just that when he said he wanted Endeavor dead, she sort of assumed he wanted it the same way Natsuo does—like Endeavor would get hit by a bus, or have a heart attack in his office, or choke on a sandwich because he didn’t take the time to chew. Like he’d just fall over dead one day.

But if there’s one thing Dabi must know, it’s that things don’t just happen, you have to go out and make them happen.

All this talk of murder over the past day or so is making her head spin. It was easier to say their humor was dark than to admit that their moral compasses spun even darker. Easier to say they were all joking than to acknowledge that she’s surrounded by people who actually consider it as an option on the table.

“Um, can I say again that murder is not really supposed to be the way people deal with irreconcilable differences?” Fuyumi blurts out.

“Aren’t irreconcilable difference for divorce?” Spinner asks, squinting at her in confusion.

“No—I mean, yes, but they’re for a lot of thing. Not murder though! Usually. I mean—“ Fuyumi purses her lips together and gathers her thoughts. “You do all still acknowledge that the law… exists. Even if you don’t follow it. Right?”

She gets a lot of blank looks. A truly, truly alarming number of blank looks.

“Please tell me you aren’t serious,” she says, a little hysterically, and then immediately registers what a pipe dream that is. “Okay, look, you realize that if people do something you don’t like, and that thing you don’t like is also illegal, there’s this other option called getting them arrested? Like, I can see how it might be sort of tricky if all of you are also doing illegal things, but can we acknowledge that’s an option? Murder does not have to be the end all be all solution, here.”

“Oh, yeah, let’s arrest the bastard,” Dabi says mockingly, like she’s the ridiculous one for not buckling down to plan a murder. “That’ll pan out.”

“That’s generally how the law works,” she snaps.

“Not for us, and you know that.”

He isn’t talking about the League. And Fuyumi—she knows how much power Endeavor has. She’s had to deal with it hanging over every aspect of hers and Natsuo’s lives when he isn’t even paying attention to them. She knows the box Shouto grew up in, because even if she couldn’t be present, she was watching, unwilling to look away again and lose another brother.

Fuyumi doesn’t even realize she’s angry until she hears herself shouting. “You can’t know anything until you’ve actually fucking tried!”

Dabi’s face contorts. “Do you think I didn’t?”

Fuyumi’s surprised, but only for a moment. Dabi’s always been hands-on about protecting the rest of their siblings, and she can believe that even after being isolated from them by his faked death, he’d try to make sure someone was looking out for them even indirectly. But, well. “An anonymous tip-off wouldn’t—“

“It wasn’t anonymous.”

Tight shoulders, balled up fists; Fuyumi watches him, but she doesn’t understand. She shakes her head, not disbelieving, but confused. “There was never an investigation. When could you have done that?”

“Of course there wasn’t an investigation.” Dabi spits the word. He sounds angry, but he always sounds angry, so it’s easy to pick ouf the threads of old pain underneath it. “You’ve got the timeline wrong. I was trying to protect you, protect Sh—Tou. And after what happened to mom? I knew I couldn’t do it alone, dammit. What do you think happened that night? I tried—“

He stops. The sudden lack of raised voices leaves the room quiet and frozen still for the span of moments. Nobody moves, or even seems to breathe, all except for Dabi, who moves forward in short, mechanical movements, eyes on Fuyumi alone. When he speaks, his voice is flat and dead and hollow.

“I went to the police seven weeks after the incident. Nothing happened. I thought they ignored it, but—“ He laughs, high and hysterical and a sound Fuyumi has never, ever wanted to hear come from her own throat. “No, it was worse. The police followed procedure, they escalated the damn thing, and it just—vanished. Bastards up top covered it up and they buried it. And three weeks later, the original?” He jabs a finger at her chest. There’s a dull ache where it impacts, but Fuyumi doesn’t move. Can’t. “It ended up on his desk.”

When Dabi said he was murdered, she thought he’d meant manslaughter. She’d thought murder was just a neat shorthand for an awful, complicated situation neither of them wanted to explain. That was already terrible enough, knowing Endeavor had let him die through his own stubborn pride and ruthlessness, but this—

“He wasn’t looking for Tou that night,” Dabi snarls. “He went straight for me. You know he gave up training me the second Tou was what he wanted, and then he dragged me in there and I knew, I knew no one was coming for us. No one was ever going to come for us. So when he decided to beat into me what exactly the consequences were for trying to get out, I decided to kill him.”

Fuyumi’s eyes burn, but she doesn’t cry. She can’t. She’s starting to think Dabi likes it that way, that the burns under his eyes are the only ones he might have given himself on purpose.

Dabi drags in a ragged breath and steps back, just once. He looks bitter, he looks pained, but he doesn’t at all look like he’s sorry. “It’s not like I thought I’d make it past eighteen, anyway. He’d have killed me eventually just on accident. But I thought, if he was dead… I’d be in jail or six feet under with him, but the rest of you would be safe.” A ruined laugh, like there’s glass in his lungs. “But we both know how that went, don’t we? I burned first.”

A tear traces down his cheek. He startles, puts a hand to his cheek and draws it away, staring at the shine of wetness on his fingertips like it’s an alien thing. He curls his hand into a fist and looks away.

Without his eyes on her, Fuyumi can breathe again. It doesn’t help the ache in her chest. “I heard you screaming,” she whispers. “It felt like hours. …I’m sorry—“

“You stayed with Tsu and Tou,” Dabi says shortly. “That was the point. You knew better than to get between us.”

“I wondered whose quirk it was, at first,” Fuyumi admits. “But they gave us ashes. And his fire doesn’t burn that hot.”

“It was partially my quirk, but that was in self-defense, and I don’t even know what the fuck the nurse gave you—“ He snorts, disgusted. “But of course the fact that I got away means it looks like he was telling the truth.”

Fuyumi can’t listen to his pain without doing something. Not again. She steps forward and wraps him up in a hug. Dabi stands still, passive, not responding but not trying to move away; it’s all the permission she’s going to get, so she holds him tight and presses her face into his hair, closing her eyes. It’s weird, being the taller one even by a few inches, but it’s nice to feel like her twin can actually fit in her arms. Like she can protect him from anything, just for a moment. Even if she knows that the protection he needed is years too late, and was never something she could give.

She can hear the quiet sounds of the others starting to shuffle. They’ve been dead quiet since she and Dabi started yelling. Fuyumi is sorry for dragging the past to light in front of them, even on accident, but she isn’t sorry enough to regret it—sometimes you have to cut open a wound to let the infection drain out.

And… she had to know.

Dabi speaks tonelessly. “If anyone takes a picture, I’m breaking the phone and you.”

Himiko’s soft awww makes Fuyumi smile dimly into her brother’s hair. Slowly, she starts to straighten up and let go, only for Dabi to lash out and grab her hair before she can move away—painfully.

“Ow!”

“Staples, you idiot. Be careful.”

Fuyumi wants to complain about the staples on the scars he didn’t give himself. She wants to scold him for pulling her hair to protect himself from even a little pain. None of those words will come out of her mouth, though, so she swallows and takes a breath. “Right. I’ll be careful.”

She’d say she’s sorry, too, but she doesn’t think those are words that Dabi is ready to hear.

Chapter Text

Dabi barricades himself and Fuyumi in the kitchen the second he gets his hair detached from her staples. The whole League knows better than to try to come in here, so it’s safe. Not that anything is safe. Not that Dabi doesn’t still want to climb out of his skin—out of Fuyumi’s skin—and forget that the world exists, or that he exists—

The door to the dining room closes quietly and Toga ducks around the island counter to wrap her arms around him. She doesn’t say a word, just clings. Dabi refuses to look at her, because holy fuck, he can’t deal with this right now.

But he doesn’t pull away, because he’s coming apart at the seams and he doesn’t even have seams at the moment.

Fuyumi’s watching him from the careful distance of the other side of the kitchen island. Dabi meets her eyes for just long enough to see the compassion in her expression before he has to look away, burned, like a demon doused in holy water. That’s not for him, can’t be for him, and he won’t accept it.

They won’t talk about this, anyway. Not when it hurts like this. They never talk about it, when it cuts this deep; it heals over faster in silence. Messier, weaker, but faster. The best he’ll get is a shadow to deflect attention, if not any blows—not that there’s anyone around to hit him anymore.

“Himiko,” Fuyumi says gently, “I was planning on making dango this afternoon. Do you want me to show you how?”

“Oooh, I’d love to!” Toga lets Dabi go to bounce over to Fuyumi and beam at her attentively.

Dabi grits his teeth and grips the edge of the counter, glaring at the doorway to the living room and daring the door to open again. If it does, he’ll have an excellent excuse to slam it shut and ice the whole thing over.

Half a second later, Toga’s back and clutching at his arm like she’s forgotten something. “Wait, Dabi, what’s your favorite flavor of dango? I’ll make some for you!”

Dabi blinks. Looks slowly over to Toga, who’s watching him with wide eyes that have less pity in them than genuine sympathy. Something deep inside him rebels, suddenly and viciously, and he scoffs. “I’m not eating any if you make them, you don’t even know how.”

“I’ll learn!” she protests indignantly. “And you make me stuff all the time.”

That’s—different. Dabi just does stuff like that. Making sure Toga gets the blood she needs, making her favorite meal when she’s had a rough day, that’s just what he does. He’s had a lot of practice. It’s not… important, or anything.

“That’s because I’m actually good at it.” It’s his thing, anyway; if Toga starts trying to do that for him, he’s going to break out in hives. Or in sudden symptoms of poisoning, because Toga can’t fucking cook.

“He used to eat the sakura flavored ones off of my hanami dango sticks when we were little,” Fuyumi confides to Toga. “I bet that would be a good place to start.”

Dabi’s going to punch her in the face. He’s going to punch himself in the face. He folds his arms tightly and turns away to glare at something that’s incapable of pouting at him, like the stupid toaster that still has scorch marks from the time Compress tried to talk to Dabi before he’d had his morning coffee.

“Whatever. Just don’t ask me to get involved when Toga inevitably fucks it up.”

Dabi gets involved when Toga inevitably fucks it up.

In his defense, there is fire involved, and he is the only fireproof person present. Also apparently the only person who knows absolutely fucking anything about fire safety, what the fuck, you two.

Fuyumi, he supposes, has the excuse of being used to being fireproof, but he’s not inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt when she’s wearing his extremely flammable body and still isn’t taking proper precautions. Toga doesn’t have any excuse, of course, but she never does. Somehow Dabi finds himself putting up with her anyway.

It’s just that some days, he really, really has to question why.

“You are boiling water,” Dabi enunciates slowly. “How did you even set it on fire in the first place?”

Fuyumi cringes, despite the fact that it isn’t really her fault. Toga just pouts at him. “Are you gonna keep yelling at us or are you gonna put the pot back on the stove so we can finish?”

“I don’t know,” Dabi says sarcastically. “Are you going to set it on fire again?”

“No!”

“Uh huh. That’s convincing, especially considering I’m sure you did it intentionally the first time.”

“Stop projecting, you pyromaniac,” Fuyumi grumbles.

Dabi rolls his eyes. “Stay out of this, we both know it was Toga’s fault.”

“Just put it back on the stove, you bully, we’ll be fine.”

Dabi scowls, but he does move to put the pot of water back on the stove. Toga takes this as permission to duck around him and almost knock him over; he staggers, the pot sloshes, and she is really fucking lucky he’s still fireproof.

Fuyumi stops cold where she’d started to lunge for the pot, remembering herself, and gives Dabi a sheepish grin as he finally places the pot safely back onto the stovetop. No burns; no thanks to these idiots. “I hear minor heart attacks are good for your health?” she suggests. “At least, that’s what they say when you have to look after kids for more than ten minutes.”

Dabi rolls his eyes and turns away—and almost runs into Toga, who is standing directly behind him holding an ice cube tray. Dabi rears back, sucks in a breath, and puts a hand on her head. “Slow. Down,” he growls.

Toga blinks at him. “But I’m not moving?”

Dabi pinches the bridge of his nose. “What do you want, you tiny demon?”

She grins at him, flattered, and offers up the ice cube tray. It’s filled with lukewarm water instead of ice, but for some reason she isn’t heading over to put it in the freezer. “The fire made our bowl of ice water not very icy. Can you freeze these?”

His stare goes flat, but her grin doesn’t dim a watt. He sighs, reaches out, and freezes the ice cubes. “I’m not just a freezer, you know.”

“I know, Dabi! Don’t worry, we love you for more than your quirk.” Toga skips over to their bowl of water and start popping the ice cubes out of their little divots.

Dabi squints at her, decides that her last sentence was probably Twice’s weird idea of teasing, and turns to Fuyumi—who is smirking at him. The smirk disappears in the next second, but Dabi isn’t fooled by her sudden innocent look, he just valiantly chooses to overlook it for the sake of a much more important cause: “Keep Toga away from the stove this time. What were you thinking?”

Fuyumi rolls her eyes, but concedes. “Himiko, why don’t you roll up the dango into balls and leave them on a plate for me to boil?”

“As long as you remember not to burn me,” Dabi mutters resentfully.

“I remembered to use a spoon this time!” Fuyumi hisses at him.

“I can make the balls!” Toga says cheerfully. “We have a lot of dough.”

Dabi looks at the bowls on the kitchen island, separated into three parts to flavor and color. They really do have a lot of dough. “I’ll leave you guys to it, then. Remember, fire stays inside the stove.”

Fuyumi tosses him a dirty look. “You can leave now.”

Dabi smirks and slinks away, but he doesn’t leave the kitchen. It’s cozy in here, and the rest of the house is colder in a way he isn’t used to—it’s just practicality.

Toga insists on being the one to plate up the dango and bring it out to the others. Fuyumi cajoles her into letting her at least carry some of the plates. Dabi sticks his hands into his pockets and pointedly doesn’t offer his assistance; he’s perfectly happy not carrying his weight in the kitchen for once.

The second Dabi leaves the bulwark of the kitchen doorway, he can feel the itch of every eye in the room focused on him. This is, if you ask him, real fucking unfair when Toga entered first and is the one carrying the actual food.

Shigaraki clears his throat. “Are you going to kill anyone if we ask you about—“

“I will slit all of your throats if you so much as finish that fucking question,” Dabi says, not missing a beat.

Shigaraki makes an expression like yeah, that’s fair, and gamely focuses on getting a plate of dango from Toga before Spinner does, like he thinks either of them have a chance in hell of being served before Twice is. The rest of them finally stop staring at him, miracle of miracles, and Dabi stakes out a seat at the end of the couch, next to where Hawks is perched on the arm like his namesake. Twice, Compress, and Shigaraki are all sitting on chairs they’ve dragged in from the dining room—or were, until Twice jumps to his feet to help Toga with the rest of the plates. Spinner scoots over on the couch to leave a spot open for Fuyumi next to Dabi.

Toga marches up to Dabi and presents a paper plate to him with a flourish. On it are four sticks of dango, all of them varying shades of pink instead of the traditional sets of three colors. “Ta-da! I made these ones all on my own.”

Dabi squints at her offering. The dango are a little lumpy, and the food coloring isn’t quite evenly mixed on a few of them. He takes the plate from her dubiously and sets it on his lap. He picks up one of the sticks and takes a dango off the end with his fingers; the consistency is, well, inconsistent.

“These are hideous,” Dabi informs Toga blandly, dropping the lone dango onto his plate.

Twice, standing behind her, speaks through a whole stick of dango to say, “Don’t listen to him, they’re amazing! That leaves more for the rest of us—“

Dabi curls an arm around his plate and stabs at Twice’s thieving hand with the bared poky end of his dango stick. “No, fuck off, these are mine.”

Twice whips his hand away with the sort of reflexes born of long-term proximity to Toga and her knives. Dabi risks leaving his plate unguarded to lift his mask just long enough to bite both dango off the stick, before pulling the mask back down over his chin and glaring all around the room, especially at Twice. These are his stupid-looking sakura dango, dammit.

They don’t taste the same as he remembers, but it’s been a long time, so he isn’t sure if it’s Toga’s cooking, Fuyumi’s tastebuds, or his own faulty memory that makes it different. Even so, he’s absolutely positive they aren’t spicy, so he isn’t sure why the fuck his eyes are stinging. Maybe Fuyumi could use some fucking eye drops too.

“Do you like them? Is sakura flavor still your favorite?” Toga demands, wide-eyed and eager.

Dabi considers that seriously. “They’re edible,” he finally pronounces, and if he sounds a little choked up, it’s probably the weirdly textured dango he’s trying to choke down.

Toga beams at him like he just handed her the sun.

Fuyumi had been a little concerned that Himiko wouldn’t be able to handle making Dabi’s dango all on her own like she wanted, but to her pleasant surprise, it seems to have worked out okay. Fuyumi might actually get to eat all of her own dango today instead of having the sakura-flavored ones snatched right out of her hands.

It’s good to know Dabi still likes them. She wasn’t quite sure anymore. He’s still the twin she remembers, she’s seen that in a hundred little things over the past twenty-four hours—but there were things about her twin she never knew, even back then. Secrets he kept, things she couldn’t understand.

(He’d told the police without telling her, and then he’d proved himself capable of legitimately trying to kill someone—)

They’ll need to talk later, because there’s questions she has that she can’t afford to assume the answers to anymore. But… not tonight. Dabi needs some space to breathe, and frankly, so does she. That’s what the dango is for—a way to remind him he has backup and people who care about him, even if trying to tell him that with actual words would go in one ear and right out the other.

She was worried he still wouldn’t notice, or wouldn’t accept it. But one look at Dabi now makes it clear that she’s won this round of emotional chicken.

Now, Fuyumi just has to distract everyone with something harmless before they devolve into another discussion about murder. What else do villains talk about? Hmmm. “Compress, I have a quick question for you, if you don’t mind?”

He tips his hat to her. “Of course, dear Ihai, what is it?”

“Your masks are very artfully made, but I’ve been wondering, how do you see though them? I haven’t noticed any eyeholes.”

“Ah! That’s an excellent question—“

“Do you see with your marbles?” Twice cuts in suddenly. “No, you’d have to be crazy to put your eyes in those things. Wait, we’re all crazy.”

Compress pauses and puts a hand over his mouth—well, over his mask—wait, wasn’t he eating? Half his dango is gone, but he’s still wearing his mask, now Fuyumi’s just confused.He turns to Twice with a deeply intrigued air. “Yes, actually, how ever did you know that?”

Fuyumi’s brain screeches to a halt. Himiko gasps like she’s trying to inhale all the air in the room. Spinner chokes on his dango. “Wait, what?”

“I use my quirk to put my eyes in marbles, it gives me an excellent range of vision,” Compress explains sensibly. He holds up a marble that Fuyumi swears she hadn’t seen just a second ago. “Exhibit A.”

Himiko ooooohs. Spinner, despite already being several feet away, leans away so far he’s in danger of falling into Fuyum’s lap if he loses his balance.

“Oh, I was right!” Twice beams. “Wait, what the fuck? I was just fucking around.”

Shigaraki leans forward to squint at the marble. “That’s gross,” he says, impressed.

Fuyumi looks at the marble. Looks at Dabi, who appears almost deliberately bored. Looks at Hawks, who seems interested but not alarmed. “I—I don’t know how to take that,” she admits. Compress is messing with them, right? He has to be messing with them, even if most of the others seem to be taking it at face value.

Himiko sidles over and leans in until the tip of her nose is almost touching the marble. “Can you see me?” she whispers, apparently forgetting that the marble does not, in fact, hold an ear.

Compress turns the marble slightly. “There. Now I’m looking right at you.”

Himiko stares, alarmingly fixated on the object. “Can I hold your eye marble?”

“Well, I don’t know that I can trust you not to break it,” Compress sniffs.

“Wait.” Shigaraki’s eyes are narrowed into the expression of a man desperately trying to uncover the core of a mystery. “I’ve seen your eyes before, and they were in your face.”

“Do you really think I’d take them out if I couldn’t put them back in?”

Spinner makes a gagging sound. Fuyumi would think he’s exaggerating it on purpose, but then Compress turns the marble toward him and Spinner shrieks, scrambling to get further away. He knocks Fuyumi into Dabi’s side and she hastily stabilizes Spinner with a hand on his shoulder that he doesn’t seem to have the presence of mind to notice. “Get that thing away from me! Oh my god, how—how do we protect against the evil eye? Do we need a fucking exorcism? How the fuck do we call an exorcism?!”

Himiko is outright bouncing up and down in glee. “Can we see? Can we see? I won’t touch it, promise! Please can we see your eyeball Mr. Compress?”

Compress lays his hand out flat, letting the marble rest in his palm, visible to his whole audience. His other hand circles above it like he’s about to perform a magic trick. Unconsciously, everyone near him starts to lean in, even Spinner, who Fuyumi can hear whimpering softly.

“Observe,” he says, voice low and smoky, and decompresses the marble.

Spinner screams as the marble expands, rearing back and falling into both Fuyumi and Dabi’s laps. Fuyumi squeaks; Dabi barely blinks, shoving Spinner off of them and onto the floor where he hits with a yelp.

Himiko frowns and pokes the thing in Compress’s hand. “…It’s a dango,” she says, disappointed.

Twice gasps. “Where are your eyes?!”

“In my head,” Compress says slowly, “where they belong.” Now that the game is up, he pins the room with an exasperated stare through the mask—how does he do that?—before his body language transitions abruptly back to cheerful politeness. “I’m so sorry, dear Ihai, I simply couldn’t resist. To answer your question truthfully, now: my masks are built with a sort of painted lattice over thick, transparent plastic around the eye area so that they can be seen through at a short distance, but not from afar. They also function quite well as eye protection.”

Spinner sits up. “Wait, what?”

Shigaraki looks betrayed. “You lied to us, Compress?”

Dabi’s bored expression finally cracks and he starts cackling like a wild thing. “God, you’re all fucking dumbasses.”

Compress spreads his hands like he wants to say, he said it, not me, but is altogether too polite. Of course, he dashes that facade almost immediately: “Why would any of you actually believe me? Twice is the one who suggested it, you numbskulls!”

“I thought I was just a good guesser!” Twice objects. “We are all idiots, aren’t we—“ He breaks off in a high-pitched shriek as Himiko shrugs, picks up the dango in in Compress’s hand, and pops it into her mouth. “Himiko! You can’t just eat his eyes!”

Dabi is red-faced from laughing at them all. Fuyumi has no idea how to feel about this chaos she’s created; on one hand, it’s indisputably a good thing Compress doesn’t actually keep his eyes in marbles, because—ew, but. Well, it was certainly an interesting theory? With… interesting results?

She turns to the only island of calm in the storm. “Hawks, you seem undisturbed by all this. Penny for your thoughts?”

Hawks takes a moment to finish chewing his dango and swallow. He looks both thoughtful and disappointed. “Not gonna lie, I was pretty on board with it. My feathers are basically ears and I can listen to conversation with them if I’m not too distracted, so I mean, marble eyes? Checks out in my book.” Hawks shrugs and goes to take another bite of dango, but pauses. Blinks. Looks up to meet the sudden silence and the blank stares from everyone around him. “What?”

“He—he’s fucking with us too, right?” Spinner says uncertainly. One of his arms snakes around the leg of the coffee table, like he’s bracing to be unbalanced again.

Hawks tilts his head. “No? I have really fine telekinetic control over my feathers, and they’re really vibration sensitive. Sound is just vibrations.”

Compress claps his hands together. “Fascinating!” he announces brightly. “I’ll be making fun of the rest of you later, except for Hawks, who will be taking the time now to answer several questions.”

Chapter Text

Three minutes into the impromptu, rambling explanation Hawks finds himself giving about how the hell his telekinesis works with sensitivity to vibrations, Hawks desperately wants an out. It’s a lot easier to make his quirk look cool and useful when people aren’t giving him blank stares for trying to explain the minutiae of how it works—and there’s a fine line between vibration-sense and oversensitivity that he’d prefer not to elaborate on. He shouldn’t have said anything in the first place, but he definitely doesn’t want to get dragged into an in-depth discussion on his weaknesses.

Hawks is delighted when Shigaraki abruptly loses patience with Hawks’ question-dodging.

“Okay, we get it, you’re weird, join the fucking club.” Shigaraki rolls his eyes. “Can’t we talk about literally anything else—“

He stops. There’s an awkward beat as everyone eyes the twins while trying really hard not to look like they’re eying the twins; Ihai is looks up at the ceiling, clearly praying for strength, and Dabi glares at the rest of a room in a challenge.

“Well, if the questions are over,” Compress starts, his voice just this side of overly cheerful, “I believed I promised—“

Hawks is hesitant to call Shigaraki’s reaction a pout, but he can’t think of another word to use. “No.”

“Or, uh, there’s eight of us here now,” Spinner offers into the awkward silence, eyes darting around to run a headcount one more time. “…Eight-player Smash?”

That, predictably, makes Shigaraki perk up—what’s a little more alarming is how Toga grins wide enough that Hawks can see her fangs uncomfortably clearly. He tries to ignore it as Shigaraki makes a beeline for the switch console that’s already on the TV cabinet.

As far as distractions go, Hawks would appreciate one he didn’t have to participate in, but beggars can’t be choosers. Time for some Smash Ultimate.

“Circle up,” Shigaraki announces. “Eight players is a lot to have on the screen, so keep track of who you are on the screen. Especially you, Ihai, I’m going to let Toga play Kirby if she wants, so the two of you might be the same character and just different colors.”

Ihai tilts her head. “I thought you said Kirby’s a… pink something. A pink alien? Is he sometimes not pink?”

Spinner leans over to start explaining why there’s eight different colors of every character—more helpful than he’s ever been with Hawks, but apparently he warmed up to Ihai while Hawks was gone. Hawks turns the world alien over in his brain and tries to decide if he wants to risk asking… probably not. The last time he’d asked Shigaraki a question about video games when they weren’t in the middle of playing one, he hadn’t gotten away until half an hour later when Compress had taken pity on him—which had been a solid ten minutes after Dabi had walked in, seen the situation and Hawks’ glazed-over eyes, smirked, and walked right back out again. Asshole.

Toga claims the pink Kirby after brightly offering it to Ihai, who politely declines and then hems and haws over all the other color choices. Shigaraki is surprisingly unbothered by the delay, but Hawks has noticed he’s pretty patient with new players—certainly a lot more patient than any of Hawks’ handlers have been when having him perform a new simulation.

Hawks navigates over to select Dark Pit, which is practically muscle-memory by now—his “main” or whatever Shigaraki called it—and then watches Ihai agonize over colors. She lands on a Kirby that’s dark navy with purple feet and bright yellow eyes; she ducks her head and Hawks can hear her mutter, “Look, it’s you,” to Dabi.

Dabi doesn’t rise to the bait. His face is pinched, and the room’s atmosphere has taken a turn for the painfully awkward yet again, though thankfully for what seems to be very different reasons. “That’s not—“

“That’s Kurogiri’s,” Shigaraki says, because he’s patient, but he’s also blunt as hell. “Choose a different color.”

Ihai blinks, looks back to her Kirby, and jumps a little as she realizes the resemblance. “Oh! Because the eyes—oh, I see. Right. I’ll do the blue one, then.” She pauses and squints down at her controller. “…How do I get back to the blue one?”

Toga jumps in and Ihai readily surrenders her controller to Toga’s expertise. Ihai takes the opportunity to turn to Hawks and ask, “Which character are you?”

Hawks uses a feather to tap at the TV under his character. “Dark Pit. One of the angel guys, the one with the black wings.”

Ihai nods slowly, eyebrows furrowed. She gives him a sideways glance. “Did you choose your character just because he has wings?” she asks suspiciously.

“Hey, wings are cool!” Hawks doesn’t know why the hell she has such a solid read on him, but it’s starting to get alarming. He’s not that obvious, is he?

Ihai squints back at the screen. “But then why not the regular angel one?”

Hawks opens his mouth. Nothing comes out.

See, the truth is that he’d picked Pit because of the wings, and then promptly defaulted to Dark Pit because… he’s supposed to be a villain. Shigaraki had told him to sit down with them and play a video game, which had seemed strangely not villainous of him, but was clearly an order nonetheless. So Hawks had sat his ass down to play, but he’d been expecting something, well, a little more like a real fight. Like a test. Something dramatic. Dark Pit was the obvious choice.

Then Shigaraki had picked Princess Peach and Hawks had spent thirty seconds sincerely wondering if he was being hazed, right up until Spinner picked out the tiny (uh, tinier) yellow lighting rat and they’d proceeded to smear each other all the way across the screen.

Dark Pit’s not nearly as fast a character as Hawks would like him to be, but he has a lot of jumps and has a distance attack—and now Hawks is unreasonably attached, so. Dark Pit it is.

“I like his aesthetic,” Hawks says finally.

Ihai blinks at him and looks down at her stapled hands thoughtfully. Hawks wonders what the hell she’s thinking about so hard until they’re both distracted by Dabi kicking her semi-gently in the thigh.

“Shut up,” Dabi hisses. Hawks cocks his head; had Ihai said something that he’d missed?

“I want you know that I’m specifically laughing at you,” Ihai tells Dabi faux-solemnly, struggling to hide the humor in her voice.

Dabi kicks her again, harder, and she really does start laughing at him. Hawks looks between the two of them, baffled, and gives it up as some sort of freaky twin telepathy thing. The bodyswap probably only exacerbated it.

Toga slides back over and cheerily hands Ihai back her controller. “There, you’re blue!” Then she hands Dabi his controller, which he definitely hadn’t handed to her—he must’ve left it unattended. Dangerous, dangerous, especially around Toga. “Dabi, you were taking forever, so I picked your character for you!”

Dabi eyes Toga narrowly as he takes his controller back, but her grin only widens. Shigaraki starts the game, and Dabi’s head snaps up in alarm. “Wait, fuck, who the hell am I?”

“Yeah, who the hell are you?” Shigaraki shoots back bitchily.

“Shut up, Handjob. Toga, who’s my character?”

“I want to know too,” Ihai puts in. “I missed it.”

“Dabi’s the Ice Climbers,” Toga informs them all gleefully. “Ihai, those are the cute little twins running around in winter coats. They have ice powers.”

Dabi’s expression goes from confused to furious in half a millisecond. “Oh, you little—I’ll freeze you, you fucking brat!” He lunges, but Toga abandons her seat and her controller to spring out of the way. Dabi snarls and lunges after her, leaving his character idling on the screen, vulnerable.

“The Ice Climbers are adorable,” Ihai says with a fond smile that is very strange to see on that stapled face. Then she brightens. “Wait, would Kirby get a winter coat if I ate them?”

Hawks has to shake himself a little to get over the weirdness of that statement; why do video games have to be so weird? But Ihai doesn’t seem phased by it. She leans in stare hard at the screen, the tip of her tongue poking out of her mouth in concentration as she floats her blue Kirby up next to Dabi’s short little ice twins and sucks one of them in.

Dabi jostles into Hawks’ shoulder. “Toga, get off of me—“ He shoves her off instead of waiting for her to obey, and Dabi frowns and looks around. “Where’s my controller? Where’s the Ice—Ihai, what the hell, spit me out!”

“I will! Just, um, wait—“ Ihai frowns down at her controller. Kirby turns around. She pushes a button and he spits a star out of his mouth that resolves into a singular Ice Climber just as they’re catapulted off the screen to the shiny effects of a character dying.

Dabi turns a deeply betrayed expression on Ihai and is met with a wide-eyed blink.

“Oops?” Ihai offers, but she’s giggling almost as much as Toga is.

Toga straightens suddenly. Her grin is a little feral, even for her, and Hawks does not like the fact that she’s looking at him. “Ihai, did you know that if Kirby swallows Pit, he gets little wings?”

Hawks sort of wants a picture of Dabi’s face with Ihai’s expression of stars in her eyes. Then she cuts him a sideways glance with a grin, and he realizes he’s about to have bigger problems. “Is that so, Himiko?”

“Oh, fuck no,” Hawks swears, and desperately tries to get Dark Pit out of the reach of the blue balloon suddenly hellbent on swallowing him whole.

Dark Pit escapes Kirby’s cannibalistic appetite by virtue of the match ending just after he gets thrown into a wall, skips out of the tumbling animation, and jumps over her before she can react.

“Nice tech, Hawks,” Shigaraki says absently, just as the voice calls time.

“Thanks. Uh. What’s a tech again?”

Spinner makes a disgusted sound, but Hawks isn’t sure if that’s due to Shigaraki’s Peach doing her little victory dance on screen or because of Hawks’ general lack of gaming knowledge. Hawks lets out a relieved breath and finally lets his shoulders relax now that the screen is displaying scores instead of feral floating marshmallows.

“I’m getting those wings next time,” Ihai says seriously.

Hawks laughs nervously and scratches the back of his head. “Uh, right, but—how about a quick break? I could use a glass of water.”

“It’s been one game,” Shigaraki says, aggrieved, but he doesn’t scowl too hard when Hawks darts a few feathers into the kitchen to fetch a drink for himself—he’d disturb too many people if he tried to stand, and besides, he’s pretty comfy where he is. Provided Ihai keeps her biting attempts to the purely virtual. Which, speaking of, someone might need to do something about her and Toga’s burgeoning friendship…

Twice reaches out to try to tap the water glass Hawks’ feathers float back from the kitchen, but it swerves effortlessly out of the way. “Hey, Hawks, do you find stuff by vibrations, or—“

“Let’s not get into that again,” Hawks interrupts wearily. He plucks the glass out of the air and takes a sip.

“That reminds me,” Compress says brightly, “I’m still obligated to make fun of all of you for believing me!”

“Not me,” Dabi objects. “I knew you were just as full of shit as you always are.”

Compress splays a hand over his chest with a dramatic gasp. “Why, Dabi, that’s hurtful.”

“True, though,” Spinner mutters.

Hawks hides his smile behind his water glass as they all start bickering. It’s like a show that never stops playing, but it’s kind of fun to be a part of, even at the edges like he always is. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Ihai watching them too, leaning closer to Dabi and resting a hand on his shoulder that he doesn’t shrug off.

That’s something strange that Hawks has noticed, too. Dabi actually lets Ihai touch him. It makes sense, seeing that they’re twins and all, but Dabi has always been so conscious of exactly how close he allows other people that it’s downright surreal to see someone walk through those boundaries like they don’t exist.

It’s not just the personal distance, either. It’s hard to pinpoint what it is, though.

Hawks had just started feeling like he was really getting the hang of reading Dabi, so of course the asshole has to go get tossed out of his body and into another, where his reactions are so much the same but so incredibly different, and it’s impossible to tell if it’s the body itself or the new player on the board. Hawks has seen Dabi lose his temper before, but he’s never seen him exhibit emotions other than rage when that happens—not like the episode that the entire League is very stubbornly ignoring.

None of them seem willing to breathe a word for fear of being murdered in their sleep, but in the privacy of his own mind, Hawks can confess that there’s something profoundly uncomfortable about having seen Dabi cry.

There’s no remaining traces of it, no red eyes left or smeared eye makeup. With the mask covering so much of his face, Hawks can’t even tell if he’s frowning. Is the curve of his shoulders because he’s defensive or because his balance is different than what he’s used to? Is his not slouching because he’s used to being taller or because he doesn’t put up as much of a front around Ihai?

He’s staring too much, probably but he can’t help it. He has a whole new person to cold read based off of less than half of a face he doesn’t know. The eyes, though—Dabi’s eyes are still familiar.

Hawks shakes himself a little. Of course they’re familiar. They’re the same color Dabi’s eyes always are, even if the shape is a little different and—also somehow familiar—?

Actually, it’s not just the eyes. It’s the glasses.

A bolt of recognition strikes, nebulous and liable to snap in a stray wind. Hawks doesn’t let himself hesitate. “Wait one goddamn second,” he blurts, and lunges for the glasses.

Dabi reels backward, leaving a trail of ice on the sleeve of Hawks’ jacket on reflex, but Hawks already has the glasses in hand. “Hey, you frozen chicken nugget, I need those fuckers to see!”

Ice. Glasses and ice. Hawks stares down at the glasses, wide-eyed, because he knows these glasses. He knows the lenses, the left almost twice as thick as the right and the particular pattern that took ages to find. He wheels around to stare at Dabi’s actual body, which is currently housing his sister, who is apparently—

“Fuyumi?”

He might or might not screech it a little. Honestly, who could blame him?

Ihai—Fuyumi???—sighs with a barely-breathed curse.

Dabi squawks. “What the fuck, Birdbrain?” Then his eyes narrow and his voice drops in register, surprisingly intimidating for a voice box that belongs to one of the nicest people Hawks has ever met. “Fuyumi, why the hell does the Number Two Hero recognize you by your glasses.”

“I mean, I would hope he does,” Fuyumi says, flustered and covering for it with annoyance. “Considering that he broke them twice.”

“Once!” Hawks objects.

“Twice.”

Dabi looks back and forth between them before pinching the bridge of his nose and screwing his eyes shut. “Okay. Do I actually want to know—?”

“Once by sitting on them like the unobservant mess that he is,” Fuyumi starts.

“Which was the only time, and excuse you, I’m not a mess.”

“And the second time when he tried to fix them.”

Hawks opens his mouth. “I almost managed it,” he defends weakly.

“What you managed is somehow cracking one of the lenses in half, and I don’t even know how you did that,” Fuyumi lectures. “Now give them back to Dabi before you spontaneously manage to break them again.”

Numbly, Hawks hands them back. Dabi snatches them out of his hand, squinting even as he puts them on and clearly scowling behind the mask, a strangely harsh expression to be worn on what’s actually apparently Fuyumi’s face. “Wait, but if she’s… then you’re…”

“Shut your mouth,” Dabi snaps.

Hawks isn’t really sure he could stand to finish that sentence anyway. Holy shit.

“Wait, you know?” Shigaraki jumps in, expression intense. “What’s their last name? What’s Dabi’s name?”

Hawks doesn’t even know the answer to that second question, but he’s still a little caught on the answer to the first. He freezes like an amateur, like a deer in the fucking headlights, and it’s Toga that rescues him from all the sudden attention.

“Fuyumi?” Toga gasps. “Is that what they called you? Wow, Ihai, your name is so pretty! Can I call you Fuyumi?”

“I—“ Fuyumi looks at Dabi, then back at Toga, clearly frazzled. She throws up her hands. “Well, the cat’s out of the bag now, so I don’t see why not!”

Toga latches onto her, beaming. “Fuyumi, you’re my favorite. After Twice.”

Twice awwws behind her.

“Shut up,” Dabi growls. He jabs a thumb in Hawks’ direction. “Yumi, why are you spending enough time around this asshole for him to break your glasses, anyway?”

Fuyumi folds her arms judgmentally. It’s a much more effective look with all the scars, but Hawks can see the school teacher posture in her body language now, and he’s not sure his brain is ever going to recover from it. “Because I’m dating his best friend, you dumbass.”

Dabi gives her, and then Hawks, a reproachfully skeptical look. “You’re friends with the bunny bitch?”

Hawks opens his mouth to defend his friend, but then a couple throw away comments are abruptly recontextualized and what comes out of his mouth is, “Wait, you tried to lateral drop Rumi?”

“Shut up,” Dabi grits out.

Hawks can’t help the incredulous laugh; trying to picture Dabi in a hand-to-hand fight with Rumi of all people is about eight times funnier than anything he was imagining before. “I’m sure that turned out well for you.”

If Hawks eyes are not deceiving him—and they never are—Dabi actually flushes. Oh god, is he embarrassed? “Shut your mouth, Birdbrain.”

“Is he capable of that?” Fuyumi mutters.

“Hey!” Hawks pouts at her, indignant. “You actually know me, shouldn’t you have a higher opinion of me?”

Fuyumi stares at him with a look so flat she could actually pass as being her brother. “You mean besides the villain thing? Hawks, I have walked out of my girlfriend’s bedroom for a glass of water to find you eating her ice cream at three a.m.—“

“Okay, that’s out of context—“

“—out of the carton—“

“Please don’t—“

“—with a fork.”

Dabi starts laughing so hard he ends up leaning into Toga for support, who almost sends them both tumbling because she’s laughing like a short, feral hyena. The rest of the League is still watching this train wreck with bated breath like a bunch of vultures on the lookout for blackmail, and he thinks Compress might have surreptitiously pulled his phone out to start filming. Man, there are days when Hawks wishes his quirk was less flashy kind and more of the sinking through the floor variety.

“Everyone knows ice cream tastes better if you steal it from someone else,” Hawks defends himself.

Fuyumi looks pained. “That’s not anywhere near the top of my list of concerns, Hawks.”

Yeah, he’s not going to win this. “Okay, look, I vote we go back to the fact that if you’re you, then you…“ He points at Dabi and trails off significantly. Shigaraki leans forward, suddenly attentive.

Dabi stops laughing so fast it’s actually impressive. “Shut your mouth,” he says direly.

And—Hawks actually does. Because his brain has finally finished catching up to the fact that he is Dabi, and if he’s Fuyumi’s twin, he’s not just a Todoroki, he’s Endeavor’s son. Despite the fact that he talks about killing Endeavor all the fucking time—

Oh.

Oh.

“Actually,” Hawks says blankly, horror rising in his throat like bile as what was a frankly ridiculous situation decides to bite down with razor-sharp teeth. “Can we go back to the part where you got murdered by your dad.”

“No,” both twins say simultaneously.

Hey, they can talk in sync. That’s funny. That’s a much better thing to focus on than the increasing buzz in his ears. Except the buzz is getting louder and he can’t actually make it go away—

Hawks jerks to his feet, stumbles, and there’s murmurs behind him but his heart is beating like a jackhammer and he has to get out of the suddenly suffocating group surrounding him on all sides. He needs to be absolutely anywhere else, like, oh, there’s a wall. A wall is nice. And the floor is nicer. How kind of them to support him in this trying time.

…He still has an Endeavor plushie from when he was a kid stashed in his closet, that he pulls out when he’s feeling especially small and needs something real to reach for. He has more of Endeavor’s merch than he has of his own.

It’s a ridiculous thing to think of, but his breathing is very fast and there’s not a whole lot else he can think of right now.

“—shit, is the bird okay?” Shigaraki’s voice, from a long way away. Two feet in front of him, Hawks’ feathers tell him, but still so far away, even as the world is coming back into focus. Shigaraki crouches down, and Hawks feels it through the displaced air rather than really seeing it.

He has to respond. Shigaraki asked him a question, and Shigaraki is the boss, so he has to say something, he just—

“When I said I knew Pro Heroes got away with murder, it was a figure of speech,” Hawks wheezes.

There’s one long moment of silence, full to bursting.

“Their dad’s a pro?” Spinner squeaks.

It’s Shigaraki that finally makes the logical leap out loud—fire, ice, and more fire. He straightens up and jerks around. “Dabi, you’re Endeavor’s kid?”

Hawks looks up just in time to see Dabi’s expression, which just might make him spontaneously burst into flames without the use of a quirk. “I am going,” Dabi says slowly, his glare no less terrifying for being on Fuyumi’s face, “to murder you.”

“You are not allowed to murder anyone in my body!” Fuyumi says.

Dabi’s murderous expression abruptly blanks out and he blinks very slowly. “…Yeah, Fuyumi, I have some bad news for you.”

Another beat of silence, very different in tone. “Dabi.” Fuyumi sounds very, very flat. Run-over-by-a-steam-roller sort of flat. “It took you a grand total of six hours to get here.”

Dabi shrugs.

Fuyumi throws up her hands. “You couldn’t go six hours without murdering someone?” she demands hysterically. “Oh my god, I’m going to have a record!”

“No you won’t, give me some credit.”

“No! You deserve no credit! Why are you like this?”

“Wait,” Shigaraki interrupts, “so what’s his name?”

“Todoroki?” Spinner suggests slowly.

“No, like, his name.”

“My name is Dabi, asshole.”

Shigaraki huffs loudly. “You can trust us, Dabi, just tell us your name already!”

“For the record,” Fuyumi says, at exactly the right volume to be heard over them but not actually sound loud, “all of you can call me Fuyumi now, I didn’t like Ihai much as a name anyway. We’re skipping ‘Todoroki’ on principle, just use my given name. For further informational purposes, I’ll tell you that Dabi’s name used to be Touya—“ Dabi hisses at her in betrayal. “—but he’s chosen to be called Dabi and if I hear you using his birth name I will set you on fire.” She pauses, clearly thinking about that. “Lightly. It will be a little fire.”

Even Dabi stares at her for that.

“What?” she asks him defensively. “I’m assuming you would also set them on fire if you could? You keep threatening them.”

“Yeah, but why are you doing it?”

“I’m upholding your reputation,” she quotes at him bitchily.

Spinner snickers. Dabi puts his face in his hands. “Oh my god, just shut up.”

Hawks can recognize the Fuyumi he knows in her sassy response. It hits him that they really are siblings, squabbling and all: one of the deadliest villains he’s ever met and the nice school teacher that’s dating his best friend are actually twins.

He has to wonder, at least briefly, if he should just… run away while they’re still bickering and distracted. He wonders how far he would get if he tried.

But he can't do that. He has a mission to complete, a double-agent status to somehow warn Fuyumi about, his best friend’s girlfriend to look out for, and then he needs to find some way to figure out what the hell is going on with this Endeavor business that he’s frankly a little too terrified to look at for too long. The pedestal’s broken, abruptly, irrevocably. Hawks isn’t sure what else broke with it.

One thing he is sure of, though—the rest of this week is going to be an even bigger and stranger train wreck than he thought.