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The pinpricks in the night sky are visible tonight, even though the smog of the city tends to haze them out more often than not. Tonight, they shine a little brighter, and maybe it’s because someone didn’t smoke their last cigarette tonight, or a car stayed off the road, but either way, they’re there, and they’re shining like a last encore. Dabi, ever the picture of grace, is too busy throwing up in the bushes to notice. Alcohol has never really ever sat well with him, but that’s to be expected, like a lot of things don’t. Dairy and fish. The smell of bleach. Campfires, ironically enough.
But it’s fine. He wipes his mouth on his sleeve and trudges through the back door up to his apartment, the one he usually only makes half the rent on, but his landlord has yet to come knocking. She probably realizes she’ll get half her face burned off if she tries to evict him. He gargles some mouthwash when he makes it to the bathroom.
Tomura is sleeping, because he always is nowadays. Healing goes faster when you’re asleep all the time. Dabi pops his head into the bedroom just to confirm, and yup, there’s Sleeping Beauty, hair fanned out around him on the pillow like a halo. In the dim moonlight seeping through the blinds, all his blemishes and scars are washed out, and his face is just that. Dabi might call it beautiful, if he were a bit more poetic. But Dabi smokes cigarettes he finds on the ground when he’s out, and he once did a whippet he found unpunctured by a dumpster. So he doesn’t. But he thinks it, and he can’t even lie to himself about that part.
What’s good for upset stomachs, he wonders blearily. Pepto Bismol would be a blessing right about now, but their medicine cabinet is barren at the moment. All that he has is a few orange bottles of painkillers he’s gotten from the doctor, one of which he’d instructed Dabi to give Tomura if the healing process got rocky. He hasn’t needed it so far, and Dabi has taken the liberty of testing one of the pills for him, once-- he must’ve slept for sixteen hours. Suppose you can’t be in pain if you aren’t conscious.
There’s some stuff elsewhere that’s a bit more fun than generic opioids, probably still in a plastic shopping bag in the closet where Dabi tends to keep his stash more often than not. Tomura got angry at him once, when he came across a couple tabs of L spread across the scuffed-up coffee table in the living area. So he keeps it all tidy, all tucked into a magic bag of tricks where Tomura doesn’t really care enough to look. Angry might be the wrong word, Dabi thinks, raising a glass of cranberry juice to his lips, having abandoned the idea of tending to his tummy. More like disappointed?
Disappointed might be the wrong word too, because disappointment implies there was a standard Dabi failed to raise himself to. There’s never been standards with him and Tomura-- one look in the mirror is enough to cement that. But Tomura has always hated that Dabi doesn’t care for sobriety; he insists that the only rush he needs is from the violence he subjects plenty of civilians to on a weekly basis, or monthly, now that things have slowed down a bit. Tomura seems to have this ideal in his head, that if he can make things perfect enough, Dabi will quit. Dabi’s never been a quitter, though-- why start now?
It does kinda weigh on his conscience, though. Maybe it’s just his brain going off the deep end again, but Dabi’s lack of empathy doesn’t really apply to Tomura. He can usually take in the scenes before him with all the passion of a dead doornail, but something about the boss just flips the switch, so he’s spewing out curses and he’s on his feet before he knows it. He’s been banned from PLF meetings for a while, and it’s only been a month, or something adjacent. Time is fake.
Dabi shivers in the evening chill, having stepped out to their shitty balcony that smells like dog piss because of the neighbors below who let their dog do its business on theirs instead of taking it out to the park or something like good owners do. He’s only in a t-shirt and pants, and he’d kicked off his boots at the door, and one of his socks has a big hole in the heel, so the cold concrete seeps into his skin like snow. It’s a perfect evening to grab a jay and sit out and watch the sky, but after the bender Dabi’s been on all night with the alcohol he had earlier, he’s not really feeling ingesting anything else. He sits on the lawn chair they keep out here, and he picks at the dried blood between the staples in his hands under the gaze of the moon.
An indeterminate amount of time later (a minute? an hour? is it morning, already?), the balcony door slides open, and Tomura is awake, finally. Dabi wiggles his fingers at him in a wave, and beckons him over to the second chair. Dabi probably looks like a drunk old man, sitting with his back hunched, but Tomura manages to make the dirty plastic chair look like a throne just by his sitting in it. The rising sun casts orange hues over everything, the cityscape, Tomura’s face. It highlights his blemishes, this time, and carves out the scars embedded in his skin like they weren’t noticeable enough. They cast shadows below his eyes and in the hollows of his cheeks. It makes him look like a painting, like something sculpted by the eye of an artist.
(These are more things Dabi would say if he had an ounce of poetry shaking around in that head of his. But he doesn’t, so he doesn’t, and just thinks it. Like a writer who’s never picked up a pen. Like a coward.)
“When’d you get up?” Is how he deflects the scene, how he tries to filter himself back into that uncaring person he usually has no trouble being. Tomura glances at him, and his white eyelashes catch the first hints of sun in them. Dabi’s starstruck for a moment, until Tomura opens his mouth to respond. “Just a moment ago.” He says, and tucks a strand of white hair behind his ear. There’s a small stud in the lobe, where Dabi had begged to let him pierce his ears. Tomura had been apprehensive (comes with the whole surgical staples thing), but he’d given in fairly quickly, more curious than worried. Dabi, the homosexual, had not expected it to look as hot as it does. It really does. Tomura has him wrapped around his pinky finger, but Dabi figures it’s not that big a deal to him. He has plenty of people to wrap around his hands, if he wants to. What’s a ring of a druggie boyfriend?
Are they boyfriends now? Is that the relationship label they’ve settled into? Dabi isn’t sure, but he definitely isn’t going to ask Tomura about it. The last thing he wants is to shatter the mindboggingly peaceful setup they’ve come to. But he’s still curious. They’ve never fucked, they’ve never kissed, but they share the same bed every night, and when Tomura wakes up in a panic sometimes, Dabi will hold onto his pinky finger and tell him stories his mom would tell him when he was a kid, in what he hopes is a calming tone. Sometimes, when Dabi’s sporting an actual fever that’s only a few degrees higher than his usual high temperature, Tomura will cover him in cold, wet rags, and put a bag of ice on his forehead until it’s melted. When Dabi babbles in his delirium all his thoughts of patricide and self-mutilation, Tomura will listen, and he will lock it somewhere in him that Dabi hasn’t really found yet. Probably the same place he keeps his memories of his dad and his sister, and all that crap. Just like Dabi.
“D’you want something to eat?” He asks, hands itching to take care of Tomura, to treat him as he deserves to be. Dabi doesn’t like this newfound, softer side of himself. It feels alien to the usual him, the one that couldn’t care less about who’s dying now and who’s good or evil now. It feels like betrayal. Tomura just shakes his head though, and the hair tucked behind his ear comes loose. “Not hungry.” He says, somewhat petulantly. Dabi smiles a little, and reaches over to tuck that strand of hair back where it was. Tomura lets him, because he always does. Because why wouldn’t he?
Still, Dabi persists. “Gotta eat if you wanna get moving again.” He withdraws his hand, even though he wants to cup Tomura’s face in his palm, even though he wants to tangle his fingers in Tomura’s hair though it’ll get stuck in his staples. Tomura doesn’t even seem to notice. He just rolls his eyes, ruby cabochons pressed into the whites of his eyes. “Because you’re the one who should be lecturing me on health.” He mutters, and Dabi laughs. He laughs, and it comes out like a cough, from his lungs too used up for anything mirthful anymore. It comes out like a cough, and Dabi thinks he’d never have smoked a day in his life if he could give Tomura something light to listen to, like a laugh from clear, healthy lungs. Like a bell.
The sun rises, in the background. Dabi makes breakfast, because of course he does. Gotta use those old cooking skills somewhere. Tomura makes a face, but he still polishes off a couple fried eggs and a bowl of rice. Dabi must be making some kind of face too, because Tomura looks up at him from across the counter. “You got something to say?” He asks, but his tone is indifferent.
Dabi wishes he could be indifferent in this situation. “Nah.” He settles on, even though his chest is in danger of opening up in the middle to give Tomura somewhere new to put his things. “I got nothin.”