Chapter Text
The shivering won't stop.
Dabi is staring at his knees, eyes bloodshot and wide. Unblinking.
It’s been too long since the last time he’s eaten. His stomach feels hollow and his whole body is tilting and swaying, like a ship being tossed around on a current. A head splitting migraine is keeping him from thinking straight.
He’s in an alley, crouched in the narrow space between a trash container and a wall. It’s been like this for a while now.
No one is coming for him, he knows. There’s no reason to even hope for any help – nobody knows where he is. Nobody is waiting for him to show up, counting the minutes until it’s okay to panic or start looking for him.
It’s his own fault. Everyone he knows is kept in the dark, but he tells himself it’s for good reason. He can never be too sure the few acquaintances he’s made aren’t just Commission agents, or worse - Ujiko’s people. He drifts through an indifferent society that doesn’t care if he ends up in a ditch, or worse. And he doesn’t mind the drifting – the constant change in the people who are around him, nobody sticking around for long enough to make any real kind of connection. He quite enjoys it. Can’t really disappoint anyone if they don’t know you well enough to have expectations.
But moments like these make him wish he had someone. At least one person, someone who would offer him tea to warm his freezing body. Someone who would care about the fact that he hasn’t eaten in three days, or that he is shaking like a leaf and that he isn’t sure if it’s the starvation, the cold or the fucking gash on his leg that’s causing it.
Dabi got an infection a little while back. Nothing serious – a half-healed gash on his thigh got a bit puffy, turned a bit red, and it spiraled from there. The infection spread and turned into a huge swollen mess. The fever came on the third day since he’d noticed the infection.
Dizzy spells, cold sweat, throwing up and passing out - you name it, he’s had it.
What if this is the straw that finally breaks the camel’s back? What if Dabi gets no more tomorrows?
And it’d be such a shame too – he’d been able to do pretty well for himself these past years, if he does say so himself. He’d kept himself fed enough to still be able to fire up his quirk on command. He’d sown himself up every time he got injured. He’d been civil to most people he met. Helped some. Never thought about the people back home. Never, ever thought about the people in Ujiko’s hospital. Ever.
It was a solid life. The life of a runaway failure, but a life nonetheless.
He tried to ask for help on day two of this whole mess. When he started seeing double from blood loss, he tried to drag his sorry ass around town to see if anyone would take the bait. Naturally, they didn’t – most people these days have pretty solid survival instincts, and their sympathy just had to be thrown out of the window as a consequence. Dabi understands. A dodgy looking guy, basically crawling on the street, with badly dyed hair and rags for clothes doesn’t really scream safety, so…it’s all good. Nothing unexpected there. The heroes will handle it.
Yeah, right. The heroes.
Another thing that wasn’t a surprise was the ambulance not showing up after Dabi had called them from a payphone he snuck (read: crawled) into. Absolute waste of coins. The whole healthcare system in this day and age is…fucked, in short. The ambulance is always “too busy” to go out and bother with low-priority cases. Health insurance could only be given to people who pay fat money. If you aren’t insured, or dying (very publicly and tragically), the system won’t step up and help you. The unfortunate reality of the current system is that it has been majorly influenced by quirks, quirk accidents and heroes.
It's fucked. All of it.
And the fucking shaking isn’t stopping.
He’s in a secluded place now, an alley jammed between two tall apartment buildings.
Drifting in and out of consciousness, he wonders if this is how it ends for him. Deliriously, he imagines the article that would be written once his dead body is found.
“Disfigured body found in alley. The unidentified man’s leg had been stabbed. Appears as though he tried to cauterize the wound, but was too dumb to do even that. Got an infection and starved to death.”
Hilarious.
He feels himself lose grasp of consciousness for the umpteenth time that day, and he welcomes the reprieve. He doesn’t want to feel the bottomless hole gaping in his stomach, filling him with cold, stabbing pain. As his eyes close, he sees shadows move in the mouth of the alley. The temporary release and relief of his consciousness buzzing out is interrupted by a brief stab of panic, before everything goes dark.
~
There’s shuffling, a voice. A light sensation on his elbow turns into hands on his arms.
Hands. Touching him.
He jerks up so suddenly that the throbbing in his leg turns into a piercing pain again. Someone’s hands are on him.
Off, off he needs them off right now-
From the back of his mind, he watches his futile efforts. He can’t even open his eyes properly; his hands move slowly and sluggishly. He can’t squeeze his fist. Dabi notices that his head is hanging, lolling, his neck too weak to support it. He feels detached from his body, somehow. Everything is moving so slow.
Still, the feeling of hands on him gives him enough incentive to open his mouth.
“…hands…off.”
It’s such a feeble attempt that he is surprised when the hands actually leave him. The crawling, maggot infested sensation under his skin subsides. There’s silence for two beats and his periphery catches sight of the hands, lifted in a placating motion.
He keeps straining to see what the stranger wants, but the blackness skirting the edges of his vision just will not let up. If they want money, they can feel free to take what remaining coins he has in his pockets. Prodding thoughts enter his head about people looking for him, strapping him to beds, chairs, shoving him into training rooms. He dully feels his breathing pick up. His shaking hands lift limply, trying to push him off of the ground, but they only shove the floor for a moment before his left elbow betrays him and lets up.
The voice is talking to him, calling out and trying to get his attention. Everything inside him feels like a raw nerve, his ears filled with so much static. He can’t decipher one single word, but it seems like the person is trying to warn him of something – he was always good at interpreting the tone of someone’s voice. One of the many skills he had learned in the Todoroki household.
The voice continues talking. So, so far away, despite the fact that Dabi knows they’re standing right in front of him.
The buzzing in his ears reaches a crescendo.
From the corner of his eye, he sees two more figures enter the alley.
His consciousness fizzles out, his last thought a silent prayer that he doesn’t get thrown into another fresh hell once again.