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It's raining.
Outside his window, the earth is blanketed in a flood rivaling only Noah's as monsoon season screams in too lionlike for April, and to Tenko's raw eyes the houses look to almost be floating atop the waves that tear grass and pavement from the ground. Glimmering and catching the lightning like a ransacked jeweler counter, their jagged and concave roofs bob up and down along the surface while their gas pipes tread leaky and calm below, drunk on the freedom of open air. Or open water, maybe. Breathing too heavy to let anyone else in.
The roads, fences, streetlights-- the trees in the park, the playground structures too-- uprooted and unseamed, they all drown in the screaming flood. Under a moonlit and indigo-black sky, the sea shines violently as if cut from obsidian rather than foam, and it soaks up the sides of the house until Tenko's certain his window will burst open and embed glass far deeper into his face than his own stubby fingernails have ever been able to. He doesn't shrink back at the thought. Just inches from the outside world, he stands still.
Even reflected by the inky and raucous night, his face in the pane looks no different than what awaits. Simply, in the way only children can, he thinks faintly, I wonder what it's like to drown.
The prickly echo of crack-crack-cracks stab at the last beats left in his chest. Even drowning would be better than this.
The window shatters. Tomura wakes up.
Above him, where his body lays just as still as he’s long since trained it to for times like these, the ceiling paint is peeling just the same as it was yesterday, and the day before. Peeling exactly the same as how it was the day they shacked up here-- actually, probably a little worse now. It's still there, though, and that's what Tomura hones in on-- it is still the ceiling of the room he knows as their bedroom. It isn’t perfect. It doesn't slope like a second floor might.
He exhales, slowly. His eyes focus and everything sharpens but doesn't splinter. Sun drips through the split blinds, and he wonders how long Dabi's been up for-- his side of the bed is only as warm as summer can offer, so it's surely been hours.
He definitely left the bedroom door on purpose too, because as Tomura wriggles out of his linen cocoon he smells some sweet aroma wafting too purposeful down the hallway to be chance. Maybe, at one point, he'd grouse about that, put on some air like being baited awake like a cat was some insult to his maturity, or maybe he’d even pick a fight about it-- because that still happens, even now. Tomura's too prickly to compromise all the time and Dabi has a temper too fiery to be anything but literal, so they fight, because it's how they are and how they've always been. It’s how it has to be. The only difference is that neither is so prideful as to hole up on the couch anymore.
And Tomura feels drained already, and he knows too well now that it isn't an insult-- it isn't anything. It's just Dabi, and Dabi likes when Tomura lets him take care of him, and Tomura also has no problem admitting to himself now that he gets downright vicious when hungry enough. But that's a communal trait no matter how much Dabi will argue it isn't-- because that's what he's gotta work on. Admitting it.
Dabi slides him a mug when he sits at the counter and promptly digs in without so much as a good morning, and Tomura nods in lieu of thanking him. He made whipped cream and everything.
It isn't raining today and it probably won’t all week, because no matter what Tomura's dreams will have him believe, it's summer now, which can only be further cemented by Dabi's incessant bitching. "It's been two fuckin' weeks." He mutters, chuffing a cigarette out on the balcony despite the source of his fury, because inside isn't much better. "Doesn't take two fucking weeks t’ fix the damn AC."
Tomura sits outside and boils with him, because though he might be coldblooded enough to rival even Spinner, laying around in that oven right now sounds about as fun as getting denailed. It's too hot to try and nap again and too bright to jab at his handheld out here either, so he just splays out boneless in his crummy plastic chair and watches Dabi fume energetic enough for the two of them. If he bothered to glance over he'd have some joke to make about Tomura looking like a melted ice cream or something; instead, he stubs the butt out on the railing with a little too much force and chucks it over onto the ground. Instead he pulls out another and grumbles then lights that one too-- sinking his fangs tight into his tail, it paradoxically remains just out of reach.
But Dabi's familiar with that sort of thing, and Tomura's one of those freaks who likes the smell, so it's no big deal, or, well. It's no big deal for now. Tomura's got other things lined up for him to smoke before he's allowed to go ahead and cancerize himself, so he can have just one more. Dabi'll bitch about that too and think he's being babied, but-- he's the last one who can complain about babying. Hypocrite, Tomura muses, mild. His gaze rests on his side profile like grease too indistinguishable from sweat to wipe away.
"Hey," He asks, after he's manhandled Dabi back inside like a hissy cat to the vet. All the windows have been thrown open and there's a fan going too, but broken AC is broken AC. The toaster in question lays like a dead fish sprawled across the couch and holding a sweating can of Coke to his forehead. "Do you know what the weather's gonna be tomorrow?"
Dabi cracks an eye open and squints at him; Tomura's shoulders raise minutely in instinctive threat, but all he does is sigh and close it again. "Fuck if I know." Tomura exhales just enough to swallow the steam to keep from choking on it, and Dabi adds, "You hopin' for somethin'?"
He shakes his head and the incorporeal moisture flies away too. "Just for it to be cooler." Dabi grunts in acknowledgement and Tomura knows that while he doesn't know any whys he does know there's a what, but either way, he doesn't press further. It's relaxing. Even stupid, small, insignificant things like asking the forecast-- trivial things with no real value-- it's relaxing to be able to and be left alone after. To ask and let that be that; just to be able to at all.
Monsoon seasons too lionlike for April. Nights too dark to die in.
He kicks his feet up on the coffee table and though Dabi's eyes remain steadfast and shut, they twitch at the unusual show outside. Tomura’s compulsions encompass much more than just germs, but that's the most visible, so disregard for it strikes louder chords than others. "Y'know," He starts, elbows reclined back, spread out like he owns and doesn't just half rent the place, and-- stops. Staring at an equally neglected ceiling as before, Tomura stops, because though he claws so vigorously at the concrete that bricks him in, grasping at even the most miniscule fractures, it is the one thing his hands remain human to. Dabi knows most of it already, if only because he truly is much more observant than anyone gives him credit for-- but Dabi possesses the reanimation buff Tomura lacks. He's already quite literally come apart at the seams. Tomura remains a twisted original and can't really tell if that's better or worse sometimes.
"Don't bother." The couch-meat mumbles. "It ain't gonna come if 't's not ready." Tomura clenches his teeth hard around his tongue and frees it only to half ask, half spit, "How do you know?"
Crack, crack, crack. "Because." Dabi yawns, hauling himself sitting and snapping the tab off his lukewarm soda when he opens it to take a sip. "Y' asked." His throat bobs as he crushes half the can in one go and offers no further explanation. You asked.
I wonder what it's like to drown.
"What if I want it to be ready." Tomura grits out, or tries to. It falls too soft to be anything heavier than a feather. Speaking his questions in sentences because maybe there's a loophole somewhere; maybe he just hasn't looked hard enough. "What if I'm tired of waiting."
Dabi finishes his corn syrup and punctuates with a belch he doesn't bother excusing before leaning back into the cushions in a mirror of the other and starfishing just the same-- or a bit more sedated. Tomura gets lethargic, sure, but Dabi's perpetually on half battery come the hotter parts of the year. Fighting fire with fire doesn't actually work that well, all things considered.
Dabi's shut his eyes again by the time he opens his mouth, and tells him, "Quit waiting, then." Blissfully ignorant of the tumultuous waters wetting Tomura's knees, or possibly just ignorant, he just says, "Ain't I always talkin' about moderation?"
He is, and Dabi repeats himself a lot no matter his benzo consumption, so Tomura is well aware. Don't let the shit do you instead.
Simple thoughts of a suicidal five year old. Simple dead sisters and simple dead mothers. It must be better than this.
And maybe it is. Maybe it wasn't worth it and it only took him fifteen years to figure that out. Because it's not raining today and Tomura liked the rain when he was a dumb little kid with nothing better to do than gallivant around in rubber boots and a poncho. Because it's too fucking hot, and sure, a dead family means a dead dad so all those bases are covered, but parents and grandparents and siblings and dogs aren't the only things that have to crumble. There's something in his head, someone, and it's not the same as the two lingering in Dabi's own that serve only to disparage and agonize depending on the ear, but it's something that needs fixing all the same. The only difference is Tomura can kill this one.
But it might also just be one of those days, and he doesn't really feel like getting up to begin with, much less getting dressed. "Get me a Sprite." He calls, and from the fridge Dabi retorts, "Get it yourself." Maybe, huh?
When he loafs back over he tosses Tomura a can before he plops down and fashions himself into a gangrene fish dinner again. Draw some X's on the eyes and you'd be golden.