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Atsuhiro never pays too much attention to Dabi beyond acknowledging him if and when they’re in the same room. He’s extravagant in his own ways, and as a showman himself, Atsuhiro can respect that. They never have reason to cross paths for very long outside of League business, and frankly, he can’t bring himself to care much either way. Dabi does his own thing most of the time, and he clearly doesn’t get along with Shigaraki, but despite that, he’s still alive and still in the League, and Atsuhiro finds himself hesitantly glad of that fact.
Dabi’s gone more often than not. He always shows up for important meetings, but disappears not long after. He’s the glass cannon of their team, but he can survive a substantial amount of damage before his quirk becomes too much for him to handle.
That’s the thing that has Atsuhiro a little intrigued by him—his quirk. Usually, if one has a fire quirk, there’s an element of resistance built in to prevent the harm that Dabi’s scarring makes it plainly obvious he lacks. No one has asked him about his quirk and he hasn’t offered the information. The most anyone gets out of him is when Shigaraki asks him if he can do the required fire-wielding for a mission, and he either confirms or denies.
Atsuhiro’s curiosity comes to a head one day, and he surreptitiously follows Dabi out after a meeting. He doesn’t wear his mask around the League anymore, unless he’s on missions, so it’s much easier to stay incognito as he walks along the streets. Dabi, likewise, has done his best to cover up. He’s wearing loose clothing and a medical mask, with a hood pulled over his head. He looks shady, but in an unimportant manner. Atsuhiro approves; misdirection is the key to any good trick, after all. If anyone looks Dabi’s way, all they’ll see is an unsavoury character rather than a highly dangerous villain, and that’s all it will take to make them look away.
After a little while of tailing, Dabi ducks into an alleyway. Atsuhiro expects this, seeing as he’s hardly trying to hide that he’s following him, though he thinks it’s best that Dabi is the one who decides if and when he wants a confrontation.
Sure enough, when he turns the corner, Dabi is looking at him blandly, one brow raised. He copies the expression, a slight twitch of his lips accompanying the movement. They’re locked in a contest of wills for a moment before Dabi’s gaze sharpens to a glare.
“What,” he says—not a question, but a demand.
Atsuhiro feels his smile morph into a grin that only grows when he sees the way Dabi almost rolls his eyes. “I was simply curious as to where you wandered off to between meetings,” he explains. “I have to say, it’s been quite unimpressive so far.”
Dabi scoffs. “Well, I dunno what the fuck you were expecting, but we’re villains, in case you hadn’t realised. Too much excitement at work to bring it out here.”
A soft chuckle rises in his throat, and Atsuhiro simply nods. “All the same, if it’s not too much trouble—would you mind my tagging along?”
Dabi’s eyes narrow almost imperceptibly for a split second before they close, and his stance relaxes. His mask moves a little, and Atsuhiro has to hold back another laugh as he realises that he’s probably sighing.
Interesting.
“You know what? Sure. What the hell. Gotta warn you, though—not much to see.” And with that, Dabi strides past him and back into the open street, not bothering to check if he’s following.
Allowing himself one last amused huff, Atsuhiro takes after Dabi and soon finds himself at the other’s side. Dabi’s hands are shoved deeply into his pockets, but soon one of them pulls out, revealing a battered-looking box of cigarettes. Atsuhiro finds himself staring at it as Dabi opens it up and takes one out. The box is mostly white, with various red outlines around writing that is unreadable from as far away as it is.
Dabi lowers his mask, raises a cigarette to his lips and goes to put the box back into his pocket. At the same time, his other hand comes up to tap the end and light it.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” Atsuhiro comments.
Dabi huffs, and with it, a small puff of smoke follows. “No one asked. ’S fucking gross anyways.” Despite his apparent opinions, he takes another drag.
Atsuhiro doesn’t say anything else, too caught up in this new information he’s discovered. He supposes that it does make sense that no one noticed—fire quirk and all. Dabi smells like smoke anyway, so the cigarettes wouldn’t do much on that front. On the whole, they’re fairly relaxed as they walk down the street, even if people tend to go out of their way to avoid them—or, probably, to avoid Dabi in particular. Neither of them note this aloud.
It’s not a busy day, but there are a reasonable amount of people for this part of town. One or two cars pass them, but not many have vehicles in this area, so it’s relatively quiet. The shops they pass are mostly run down, with leaking drainpipes and dirty windows. Atsuhiro only wishes it were different, but he supposes that he’s only one man, and a villain at that. It’s hardly likely that anyone will listen to him.
“Here,” Dabi says, stopping abruptly and dropping his cigarette, stomping it out as they come to a corner store with a flickering neon sign, proclaiming it to be ‘Sora’s.’ It has the same mix of well-kept but ill-maintained as the rest of the street does; the same dirty windows and leaky pipes that are the one thing in common across all the shops. Atsuhiro has seen this place a few times, but he’s never gone in. As Dabi pushes open the door, he thinks that he might as well. There’s a first time for everything, after all.
Inside the shop is not so different from outside. There are three shelves separated from the walls and a long refrigerator against the one to the left. The shelves seem to be fairly organised, if a little bare, and it’s reasonably well lit, save for two lights near the shop window that are missing entirely. The floor is the kind of linoleum that would be expected in schools.
“Shiori, you little shit!” Dabi calls, startling Atsuhiro a little.
At the shout, a young woman behind the counter—though, Atsuhiro’s not too sure she’s an adult; she looks far too young to be running a shop alone—looks up from playing on her phone. She’s bald, with silver eyes that seem to glow, calling attention to them. She keeps flickering in and out of visibility, switching from opaque to invisible and floating somewhere between the two. Her sharp grin reveals fangs not unlike Toga’s, and Atsuhiro notices that her ears are slightly pointed.
“Backlog Bitch,” she returns, though her smile never fades, and there’s no malice in her voice. “Miss me?”
“Not a chance.”
Atsuhiro can’t help but feel a little like he’s intruding on a personal matter as Dabi strides up to the counter, ripping off his mask entirely and stuffing if into the same pocket as the cigarettes. He obviously goes here often. And, ‘Backlog Bitch’? What does that mean?
Speaking of cigarettes, Dabi once again takes them out and waves them a little. The woman at the counter—Shiori—shaves her grin down to a smirk. “You out already?”
“Fuck off with that bull. Might be out of town soon and I don’t know when I’ll be able to get back.”
“And deprive me of your ugly mug? You wouldn’t dare.”
“I come in here, slowly take your mountain of discontinued cigarettes off your hands, and this is what I get? Slander.”
All in all, Atsuhiro’s by no means prepared for this situation. He doesn’t know what he though Dabi was doing when he disappeared for hours on end, but it definitely wasn’t this.
“Just get me my smokes, Shitty Shiori.”
Shiori barks out a laugh. “Whatever you say, Backlog Bitch.”
Shiori must have the cigarettes pretty easily on hand because it takes barely a minute for her to disappear into the back of the shop and come out with four boxes, shaking them in a similar manner to how Dabi had shaken his single box when asking her for them. She and Dabi fire off playful insults all the way through his payment, Shiori flickering like the neon sign outside every time she laughs, Dabi straining his staples with a wild grin.
The whole altercation barely takes five minutes, but to Atsuhiro, it lasts for so much longer. It’s like he’s stumbled into a surreal world where Dabi’s not a recognisable villain, corner stores are owned by foul mouthed young women, and nothing else matters except who can get the last word.
It’s… he hesitates to say ‘nice,’ but, well, what else could it be?
After insisting Dabi take a bag for his cigarettes, Shiori seems like the victor of a battle Atsuhiro was unaware was even going on. Her flickering slows as Dabi walks away. “Don’t forget to come back, you unbearable bastard!” she calls. “You’ve got sixty-nine more of those waiting for you in the back!”
Atsuhiro sees Dabi’s staples strain against his grin before he puts his mask back on. “Nice!”
The shop door closes to the sound of Shiori’s laughter.
Dabi walks off immediately, leaving a stunned Atsuhiro in his wake. It takes a few seconds for his brain to catch up, but eventually Dabi realises that he’s down an impromptu companion and backtracks to stare Atsuhiro down until he comes to his senses.
“What?” Dabi asks, more deadpan, but less of a demand than their initial confrontation. “Shiori freak you out or something?”
Dabi’s noticeably more personable after his conversation with Shiori. Actually, verbal sparring match is a more accurate term for it. Atsuhiro can see a distinctive light in his eyes that wasn’t there before. It’s odd, but not… not a bad thing.
“‘Backlog Bitch’?” Is the thing he chooses to focus on.
Dabi snorts. “Yeah.” He motions for Atsuhiro to walk beside him and carries on. He starts talking again once Atsuhiro catches up. “Went in about three, four years ago—needed something to take my mind off of things for a bit. Asked her for the first cheap brand she could find, she gave me these ‘cause she had ‘em in storage and no one was buying that much of the backlog. I’ve been going there ever since.”
Atsuhiro hums. “She said they were discontinued?”
“A while back,” Dabi confirms. “Store owner bought the wrong brand one time and they’ve been sitting in big brown boxes for ages.” He chuckles a little. “Well, until now. The company still does cigarettes—I’ve had the newer ones, and they’re way better than this shit—” He holds up the bag. “—but I guess the older ones aren’t terrible.”
Frowning, Atsuhiro eyes the bag. “If you don’t like them, why get them?”
At this point, a van drives past, and Atsuhiro can vaguely hear Dabi’s short burst of laughter over the sound of its engine. Once the noise disappears, Dabi makes no effort to respond to the explanation. In fact, they get almost back to the League before he speaks up again.
“It’s a stupid reason, but,” Dabi sighs, “I feel kinda bad, y’know? Guilty.”
Atsuhiro admits that it is most definitely a strange reason to buy cigarettes you don’t like, and it’s even stranger considering Dabi is a villain, but he’s never been one to judge, so he simply lets Dabi continue.
“Like, if I didn’t get them, no one would, so I feel like it’s a weird obligation now. Like if I stopped, I’d be abandoning them somehow,” Dabi explains. “Shiori’s a little shit, but I think she gets it. Don’t ask me how. She has the newer ones in stock and she’s offered them to me before, but she knows that even if I don’t really like the ones I buy, they’re still the brand that got me through—you get me?”
Atsuhiro most definitely doesn’t, but just as he finds himself drawn to the pseudo magic of the pre-quirk era, even in the face of the real magic he can perform with his own power, he can appreciate Dabi’s reasoning. “And Shiori?” he asks instead.
“She—” Dabi cuts himself off. “She’s just a kid,” he says. “She’s—” He sighs. “She introduced me to my brand, and she’s far too aware of who I am and what I do. But I guess she still needs—a friend, I don’t know. Even if that friend is a villain. I don’t know what I’ll do when the cigarettes run out. Might never go back there again, but Shiori at least deserves some warning before then.” He switches the bag to his other hand, leaving it only for a moment before he switches back. “If I’m guilty about leaving my brand behind, it’s ten times worse when I think about leaving Shiori alone—just, not going back. She’s like a little sister, and I—I can’t just leave my sister.”
There’s a story there, of that Atsuhiro is certain, but by this point they’ve arrived back at the League and are hovering awkwardly outside the door. Neither of them want to be the one to make the first move. The sound of building works echoes from a distant construction site, mixed into the city’s medley of overly-loud music and car horns.
“Well,” Atsuhiro begins, “it was lovely to walk with you, Dabi.”
Dabi nods, a mischievous twinkle in his eye. “You too, you fucking stalker.”
He leaves Atsuhiro outside and slams the door behind him. Through it, Atsuhiro can hear the sounds of the League shouting—Shigaraki’s yells rising above them all—as he stands, blinking at where Dabi used to be. Shaking his head, he feels something odd rise up in his chest. It’s almost nice.
Atsuhiro still knows next to nothing about Dabi, and he supposes that facts don’t matter much in the grand scheme of things. He’s seen a side of Dabi that he hadn’t know was there before today. It puts a new perspective on his character, to know that he’s capable of caring so deeply about little things like the slowly dwindling supply of discontinued cigarettes he buys from a flickering cashier in a corner store called Sora’s.
He thinks he’ll start to pay a little more attention from now on. Can’t have his own favourite skill of misdirection used on him, can he?