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Dabi knows he’s going to pass out as soon as he walks outside.
It’s something he had to get used to, after Sekoto Peak - the scars. They’re getting worse by the day, and he knows it; the burning pink is slowly fading to purple, his skin is getting drier and drier, every day he can feel less and less as his nerve endings fray away at the edges.
And that - of course, sucked, but he could handle it. Dabi knows pain, he knows burns, he knows how to deal with them with or without treatment. He knows the hot ache of fire on his skin and how it festers underneath it, but he doesn’t know this.
The scars make him feel so horribly, awfully sick. Sometimes sick enough it confines him to his bed, the worn and ratty thing he’s been sleeping on for the past few years. He’ll never get used to the nausea, how exhausted it makes him feel, how much it truly affects him. In all of the ways he thought running away would hurt him, he’d never even considered this.
And so as soon as he’s hit with the fresh morning air, he feels his legs almost crumple underneath his own weight, and he’s struck with the familiar sickness in his throat.
He’s building up resilience, is what he tells himself as he walks - how can he ever be anything if he feels too sick to go anywhere? - but even in the soft sunlight, the corners of his vision are fading to black, and his head is already swimming.
Dabi isn’t scared. Dabi doesn’t get scared. Touya did, sometimes, but he’s not him anymore.
Touya didn’t get sick all the time, either, but that’s something he can wallow over later. When Touya did get sick, his mother was there to coax him back to bed, someone- anyone- was there to hold him through it, tell him it was going to pass, and all of this horrible feeling is only temporary.
That’s a thing of the past, now. Dabi’s older, and while he may not be wiser, he’s not the tiny kid who couldn’t handle getting sick. (He can handle getting sick, is what he’s trying to prove to himself by going out. He’s not Touya anymore, and he never will be again).
The bandage on his left arm is coming off at his wrist, exposing some of the worse scars, the uglier patches of dark purple. He almost finds comfort in fiddling with the end of it as he walks, feeling weak and sick and small in his jacket that’s still too big for him. He’s sixteen and it still hangs off of his lean frame - but he supposes beggars can’t be choosers.
He feels pathetic. What kind of villain is he going to be if he can’t manage a walk across a couple of streets?
He’s suddenly too cold and too hot at the same time, can feel the sweat in his hair but his fingers are completely frozen solid, his stomach is in pain but he can’t feel his legs-
Dabi doesn’t want to get used to this. He wants to get treated, he wants to get better, but there’s not a whole lot of options for him. He’s the son of Endeavour who’s supposedly dead. It’s not like he can just waltz into a hospital and ask to be seen without being sent right back to his father.
He’ll cope. He holds onto a dirty brick wall to support himself, dragging his fingers along the cement lines as his knees wobble beneath him, and he leads himself behind a building, away from the roads and the people.
He’ll be fine here, he thinks. By the time someone finds him, he’ll be well enough to leave.
And so Dabi falls. His hand slips from the wall and his feet from the ground, and white hair splays out upon the concrete beneath him.
The floor is cool, and he’s too out of it to notice any pain.
He can just rest. He shuts his eyes, just for a second.
He wakes to a hand on his forehead, blissfully cold against feverish skin.
The sky is a greyish sort of blue and the concrete a dull brown, his arms are stiff and his legs have locked up, his bones are aching and his muscles are so horribly sore. He can feel the pain now, a throbbing sting in his side where he’d hit the floor.
His vision is blurred through the fuzziness and remnants of sleep still in his eyes. He can make out the vague shapes of where he is - he’s never seen this place before, but he knows he’d gone behind a building so he could pass out in private. There’s the outlines of the pavement slabs, more buildings that tower over him like they’re just trying to make him feel even smaller.
Dabi’s not a stranger to this. Passing out and waking up. It’s something he’s growing used to, but he’d much rather do it inside, somewhere he knows - rather than behind a random building, free for anybody to stumble upon, a weak child who’s too sick to even get up from the floor.
He just grits his teeth. He’s going to have to wait it out before he can leave, and he knows it, until-
Someone is crouching down next to him, squinting their eyes through their glasses, and Dabi knows who it is.
“Hi,” he says to Giran, and his voice feels like glass in his throat when he finally uses it. It’s a croak more than anything.
“Hi, kid,” Giran mutters to him. “What happened?”
“Think I’m sick,” Dabi slurs through the haze of his mind, through the heaviness of his eyelids and the dryness of his throat. His cheek is pressed against the concrete and the dust is sticking to his skin and he’s so tired, barely able to keep his eyes open as Giran stares down at him.
He’s crouched down next to him, looking over him where he lies on the floor, shaking but only slightly. Dabi’s eyeline goes straight to his shoes.
His jacket feels like a blanket over him, but since his quirk has been getting stronger and harsher, he can’t regulate his temperature properly. It was fine before he’d run away - when his house was properly built, when he still ate three meals a day, when he wasn’t so sick. His jacket on him now feels suffocating. It traps him in warmth he doesn’t want.
Sweat sticks his hair to his scalp; he’s too hot, his hands are freezing and he’s shivering but as he lies on the floor, he’s still too hot. He’s so hot it just adds to the nausea, but at the same time, he’s too tired and too sick to take it off himself.
As he stares at the soles of Giran’s shoes, he can’t even begin to fathom how much he hates this. Being too sick and too weak to even get up off of the dirty floor, take his jacket off himself. He almost wants to tell Giran to just leave him here. He’ll get up when he can.
“Think you’ve been sick for a while,” Giran mutters back as a violent shake runs right through him, another wave of nausea. “Why’d you go out then, huh?”
“Have to get over-” Dabi stops, pauses to shut his eyes as his nausea worsens, and his head spins even while he’s lying down. “-Being so sick.”
Giran just sighs, resigned. Dabi keeps his eyes shut, full of sickness but now also embarrassment, because he knows he’s not the only one here anymore. The solace he found in the solid, lifeless floor is gone now there’s somebody watching him. Dabi likes Giran, he’s grateful for him, and the last thing he wants the man to see is him curled up on the floor behind a building he doesn’t know, completely at the mercy of his own body.
He can be a villain. He can be useful. He just needs to show it - and passing out on the floor doesn’t show it.
Not to him, anyway. Giran doesn’t seem to mind.
Dabi’s sure he doesn’t mind, because he opens his eyes when he hears a shift, and Giran is sitting down next to him, dirtying his suit on the ground.
“Come on. Sit up.”
His eyes are still heavy, still fuzzy as he opens them again, and comes face-to-face with Giran, looking at him expectantly as grey hair blows a little in the wind. He doesn’t want to disappoint him, but even more than that, he doesn’t want to sit up. He wants to lie here for the foreseeable future, simply rest on the ground until everything goes away, but something tells him Giran won’t let him do that.
As he tries to curl in on himself, he ends up touching his forehead to Giran’s knee. The pressure is grounding, even if it’s just his forehead. It’s not a comforting touch in any sense of the word, and Giran didn’t even initiate it, but Dabi’s chest loosens, and he breathes like he’s being taken care of; like Giran wants to comfort him.
“Kid, you’ve gotta sit up,” Giran says, scratching Dabi’s head with his long nails.
“Don’t want to,” Dabi murmurs back, unfocusing and focusing his eyes again, and a quiet groan escapes him against his will as the hand on his head retracts. Giran can’t make him move, he knows what’ll happen if he moves from where he’s lying; he doesn’t want to throw up in front of him, and especially not on him.
“You’ll feel better,” he tries to convince.
“The floor is nice,” Dabi says, not moving his head.
“The floor is concrete,” Giran’s becoming more exasperated by the second. Dabi knows the switch in his tone, knows the man is tiring of him, and he hates how much he hates it.
Dabi groans and tries to turn over, remove his head from where it rests on Giran’s knee, but he just ends up getting himself stuck - and he feels pathetic. Feels so horrible and so weak as Giran just watches him writhe around on the floor, trying to hide from him, struggling to turn away and tuck his face into his chest.
He’s weak. It’s a mix of both Touya and his father’s voices in his mind, telling him he isn’t good enough.
“Stop-” Dabi coughs, chokes on the bile rising in his throat. “Stop looking at me.”
“Come on, Dabi,” Giran says, and Dabi stills as a pair of firm hands find his shoulders, holding them over his jacket, feeling the bones that stick out of them. He’s still, completely still as those hands slip underneath his arms and pull him up to sit.
Dabi’s a dead weight. Giran supports him when his body falls limp against his chest, his eyes slipping shut once again as a wave of nausea hits him in full force. Dabi shouldn’t have let him scoop him up, he thinks. He should have struggled, shouldn’t have let Giran hold him, because now he feels worse than ever-
But also comforted. It’s a horrible balance that’s not really a balance at all.
“Don’t feel good,” he mutters into Giran’s shoulder, into his scarf that smells of smoke and cheap perfume.
He’s sixteen. Sixteen and falling into the shoulder of a broker, of somebody he met on the street, somebody he’s trying to convince he can be a villain.
This isn’t convincing, and he knows it. He’s shivering with the sickness and zoning in and out with the pain and so exhausted he can barely think, let alone speak. He’s lost in a foggy haze and the only thing keeping him here, keeping him behind this building lying sick and dizzy on the concrete, is Giran.
The body he’s leaning against. The calloused hand on the back of his head to keep him from falling over, passing out again and flopping right back to the floor. The fingers finding their way through snowy white strands of hair, tainted grey and brown from the dirt on the floor where he’s been lying for god knows how long.
It’s only as Giran shifts a little, trying to let Dabi settle, that it hits him - another horrible, violent rush of sickness, right up his stomach and through his chest, slowly bubbling up in the back of his throat.
“Sh- shit,” he murmurs, though it’s muffled by fabric, and he tries to push Giran off with weak, shaking hands, his bony fingers trying to shove the lapels of his suit jacket- “Giran, I-”
Dabi uses what little strength he has left to push Giran off of him. He loses the small amount of comfort he did have as he forces him off, and he doesn’t want to, but he needs him away. Giran looks at him, scandalised, but catches himself before his back hits the floor, just in time to watch Dabi fall back to the ground and retch loudly.
He’s shaking. He’s shaking so badly he thinks he’s going to faint again, even though his face is already barely an inch from the floor.
Breathing heavily, Dabi grips his own hair with clammy hands, tries to hold the grimy mess of white out of the way before he’s sick, because he knows it’s coming. He knows it’s coming and knows Giran is going to watch and the only thing stronger than his self-hatred is the embarrassment.
This isn’t Dabi. This isn’t a future villain. This boy, laying sick on the concrete, is wholly and completely Touya.
That thought gives him some kind of superficial calm as he retches again, and the little he’d eaten that day is brought up over the concrete.
If Giran could just leave, he thinks, it would be great. But again, beggars can’t be choosers, and that’s how he finds himself letting the broker hold his hair back, letting him rub circles between his shoulders as it gets far, far too much for him to handle.
Dabi sobs as he’s done. He isn’t proud of it.
The shame burns worse than the nausea. It’s subsided a little now, as has the dizziness in his head, but that just makes him so much more aware, and so much more mortified. He just passed out and threw up in front of Giran, the man who he’s trying to convince he’s worthy, he’s a villain to be feared, he’s not weak-
But even as he screams that sentiment in his head, over and over again, he keeps crying. He cries and allows Giran back into the position he was before, allows him to wipe the sheen of sweat off of his forehead and the back of his neck where it had festered under his collar.
He’s gross. Maybe being so sick all the time just comes with being a villain. Some sort of entry-level requirement.
“I- I can’t do this,” Dabi hiccups, shutting his eyes and leaning his forehead against Giran’s palm, which is still miraculously cool. He feels miserable, ashamed and filthy and embarrassed and still so sick. He doesn’t understand why Giran lets him stay with him, in the cheap, tacky apartment he calls a home, because he’s not a villain. He’s not a villain when he can’t make a ten minute walk down a quiet street.
“I can make you forget, if you need to,” Giran offers gently. “We don’t ever have to talk about it again.”
Dabi’s never had Giran’s quirk used on him. He’s never even seen him use his quirk, either - but at this moment, he doesn’t care at all, and nods immediately into Giran’s shoulder. He’d do anything to never remember this day. If he could go back in time, he’d scream at himself just to stay inside; and since he can’t do that, this is the next best thing.
He’d rather these memories were foggy. Barely there. He knows Giran himself will remember it, but he won’t, and so he won’t even know what Giran remembers - and it gives him a sort of comfort. He’s begun to hate being vulnerable.
“I’d like that,” Dabi says through the scratchy pain of his throat. He sits up with shaky breaths, his body still light and quivering, and sniffs as he wipes his chin with his sleeve. “I want that.”
Giran’s never used his quirk on him before, but it’s not as bad as he’d imagined. He feels a hand on his forehead again, this time with purpose, a steady palm pressing over his skin- and Dabi melts. His brain goes fuzzy and his vision is blurred and he slumps back into Giran’s hold when he shuts his eyes.
He fights back a whimper. It should be soothing, the knowledge that he’s forgetting, but it’s almost terrifying in the moment, where he can feel everything going muddy, and he still feels nauseous, can still smell the stench of it, but he’s not so sure why anymore.
The next time, he doesn’t hold back the pitiful noise, and Giran just gently pats his back. His face is slack, his eyes unfocused and his mouth open, and even though his memory is slipping, he feels in control.
It’s not a healthy coping mechanism. It’s not a long-term solution. But his head is resting in the crook of Giran’s shoulder and the bad thoughts are slipping away and he doesn’t care.
“Come on, kid,” Giran says. “Five minutes. Let’s just go.”
Dabi lets himself be helped up, lets Giran’s arm link with his as he leads him out from behind the building, and the man supports him while he walks back in a haze.
He wakes up on the couch later, his knees tucked up to his chest with a thin, worn blanket tucked around his shoulders. He’s been drooling a little where his face lies on the armrest, and so he wipes his face as he blinks his eyes open, feeling so tired but not being able to place his finger on why.
He remembers leaving and passing out. He remembers Giran finding him, and then- and then waking up. Here. With Giran sat at the desk on the opposite side of the room.
With a small sniffle, he tucks his face into the blanket that’s draped over him, the one covering his shoulders, tucked in with so much care. The scent he breathes in is distinct; old perfume laden down with thick smoke, and it’s a good kind of warm. He’s not sweaty, not suffocated and he’s not overheating - he’s just… warm.
Yawning, he stares at Giran, who’s tapping away on his laptop, and feels-
He doesn’t even know.
The couch creaks when he shifts a little, and Giran looks up and over at him, swaddled in a blanket on a couch that was probably on trend fifty years ago - and he smiles.
Dabi scratches his head, tugs his fingers through threads of white that- he notices, now, has been brushed for him- and he smiles back, his face colouring pink. He feels better. Feels not as nauseous now he’s had a chance to lie down and breathe, but also- feels comforted.
While Giran watches him out of the corner of his eye, Dabi falls back asleep.