#completely revised

“Silly, isn’t it?” Well, at least you thought so too. “Reminds me of the one my grandmother used to wear. How about yours?”

A twist of his stomach. He doesn’t want to talk about this.

“Wouldn’t know, never met her,” he dismisses as he falls back onto your sofa, the springs complaining underneath him with the sudden weight.

“Don’t you speak to your family?” You ask carefully from the stove top, meeting his eyes over the quaint window in the wall between the two rooms. Family was a topic neither of you ever touched upon.

“They think I’m dead,” he shrugs, eyes casting over the framed pictures dotted around the place. Didn’t even fucking look — but he keeps that thought to himself.

“You faked your death?”

“I didn’t fake my death!” he scoffs, left hand reluctantly rising to push up his right sleeve and reveal the whispers of still smoke rising from his charred skin “...I just let them make assumptions”.

“I never heard about a kid killing himself with his quirk, though,” your eyebrows crease into a thoughtful frown, “surely that’s something that would’ve been on the news?”

He swallows back the biting response. Your lack of knowledge was his fault, not yours. Your assumptions couldn’t be faulted, because they were reasonable. It was uncommon for people to die by their own quirks even when they were incompatible, because their parents would buy them prescribed support gear immediately. A story like his, especially being associated with a top hero, should have definitely been on the news. There should have been uproar.

“That’s because they never reported it,” he responds blankly, forcing his tone flat to smooth out any crinkle that might indicate hurt. He didn’t care.

“They didn’t…”

An agonising silence descends upon you both. He distantly remembers those first few weeks after he’d left home, how paranoid and exhausted he had been, countless nights spent awake listening for those imposing familiar footsteps. But they never came because they never looked.

He hears your stuttered exhale and glances in your direction, met with your expression of regret and your mouth forming around words that you don’t know how to say. You’ve abandoned the simmering food to approach him, sitting yourself on the arm of the couch. If you were about to say sorry he might just combust. He didn’t need pity, he didn’t want it and especially not from you.

“Your family are... dicks”.

It’s unexpected. He snorts shortly before catching himself, hand flying up to cover his mouth to cover the grin threatening to spread across his lips. Relief replaces the sadness that had clouded your eyes and the atmosphere lightens.

“That is one way of describing them,” he muses as he leans his head back over the lip of the sofa and sinks into the cushions. You seem to take his relaxed posture as a signal to sit closer.

“Do you want to talk about it?” You ask softly, one of your hands resting only an inch from his own on the seat cushion. He stares at the space in between and his pinky twitches, yearning to just—

Dabi swallows. He hadn’t long been five years old when it first became obvious his quirk was hurting him. He'd been forced into the office of a sallow faced quirk doctor by his father. He remembers well the expression she wore, how her lips pursed, how her throat bobbed as she greeted him with regret. He’d known then, intuitively, that it was over.

Betrayed by his own body. He’d burnt so much that even his mothers soft hand stung, not that he often felt it anyway. He exhales, eyes falling closed. If he cared less about what you thought of him he might actually be able to stomach telling you.

“No,” he finally states and thankfully you respect it without pressing any further, returning to the food to begin plating up. He lingers uselessly, wondering if he should offer to help with anything, but you don’t make any requests for him to do so.

“It’s nothing special, just grilled fish and rice,” you speak softly and quickly, rambling, as if you’re nervous. He seats himself at the table and you place the plate in front of him. “You can eat fish, right?”

He pauses. Nods wordlessly and avoids your eyes, taking the chopsticks between his thumb and forefinger. It does look good, atleast. He can’t remember the last time he had a proper home cooked meal. You sit across from him anxiously watching, pupils flickering from his face to the food.

“What?” he glares, tone sharp in self consciousness. An expression of ‘I’ve been caught’ flits across your features before you gaze down at your own food, chopsticks picking at the fish.

“I just wanted to see your reaction, wanted you to like it is all,” you murmur, eyelashes casting a shadow along the top of your cheeks. He’s reminded again of how beautiful you are, how so much of your beauty is in the sincerity of your actions. With a shallow sigh he shovels a piece of fish and some rice into his mouth, swallowing quickly.

“It’s fine,” is his short reply, and you’re happier for it. It’s more than fine, he wants to say, I can taste your effort and your care and I’m grateful for it. But he doesn’t — because that would make him vulnerable, that any more cracks might just shatter him and he’s afraid to know what might spill out.

Dabi is an unreliable narrator in his own life, he’s aware. He could die and no one would know the full story, you were the only person he’d let get this close to it and you weren’t even aware of that. It was frightening yet for some reason he wanted you to stumble upon it, wanted you to know so that it might relieve him of the pressure of hiding from you, so that he might finally have someone on his side.

That, or you’ll leave him.

You eat together in comfortable silence after that. There are moments when your foot presses against his and it feeds the tension but neither of you acknowledge it. Plates clink together as he stacks them together upon finishing the meal, ignoring your pleas to let you clean it up yourself.

“You cook, I clean,” he shrugs, glad his hair is long enough to hide the pink of his ears. “I am capable of washing a few dishes”.

Dabi puts them in the small sink and turns the tap, water awkwardly sputtering out before eventually beginning to run smoothly. He dips his hand under the stream to get started when he hears you curse.

“Shit, wait, the water comes out hot at first—”

He laughs. You’re so fucking cute.

“I can run forty on a good day, believe me I’m fine,” he shakes his head with an amused smile, grimacing then at the faint sting as the suds meet his sutures. Mercifully, it’s the only pain he can feel. Your mouth hangs open while you process his words, hand suspended in the air like you want to touch him.

God knows why he indulges you, tilting his head toward you. With a little more care than necessary you lay your hand across his forehead like a mother might to their child and he finds himself glad that he lost the ability to cry. You skin is so much cooler than his, softer too, he feels beastly in comparison.

“Do… Do you get sick often?” you ask feebly, hand slowly slipping down to the curve of his cheek and cupping his jaw.

“Thanks to my quirk I don’t get infections all that much,” he explains and turns slightly into your palm, desperate for the loving touch, all the things he can’t tell you pinning his tongue. “…Have plenty of other problems, though”.

The answer doesn’t seem to placate you all that much. You scan the sutures lining his face and lightly stroke your thumb along the small titanium rings that tightly hold his mismatched skin together. Like a moth to a flame he finds himself drawn forward, not noticing until your nose brushes his, and he freezes in fear that he might’ve overstepped.

But you aren’t moving, your eyes are heavy and your chin angled toward him like you’re waiting. You’re waiting for him to kiss you, he realises.

Your lips are much smoother than your hands. His mouth slots seamlessly against yours, kissing you gently first like he’s giving you the chance to regret it, but you press back against him with enthusiasm that has a familiar spring coiling in his stomach. The kiss dwindles into something fervent, his tongue parting your lips and his hand meeting the small of your back. You cling to him and he pulls you firmly against his front, drinking down your pleased whimper.

You grab the lapels of his jacket and pull him back into the main room toward what he guesses will be the bedroom. Your touch is dizzying and filling, you’re salacious when you breathe his name and it shakes him, a distant bittersweet feeling at the sound of his alias. Dazed, Dabi pulls back from you, just barely etching the whine of complaint you give, and the way you chase his lips, to his memory.

He wants to, but he can’t do it. He can’t simply fuck you like he has others, knowing as soon as he’s had you he’ll be ruined for anyone else. It isn’t something he can have only once. You mean more to him, his feelings for you are so insurmountable he doesn’t know where to put them, but he doesn’t know what you want. Doesn’t know if he deserves this; if he could stomach your rejection.

You call his name, the sound acting as a prong collar around his throat.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he says.

“You’re lying Dabi, it’s written all over your face” you shake and he can feel the weight of your stare as you search his expression for answers. There’s that name again.

His fathers words fester within him like an infection. After all, Touya has always been tender. Not tender like loving, tender like a bruise. Things that appear small and inconsequential, words that you mightn’t think twice about, they’ll hurt a little more than they should. He wants to ask you what this means to you so your answer might get rid of this intolerable twisting mass that sits where his lungs should be. He wants you to clarify so there is no doubt for the stupid little voice in the back of his head to latch onto. But pride is a powerful thing, a difficult thing to let go of.

“Please tell me what I did wrong,” you murmur, thumb rubbing circles into the back of his hand in a coaxing manner, “it’s alright if you don’t want this”.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” he says, his voice hoarse. Your disbelieving silence irritates him. Huffing a monotonous laugh, Touya stumbles over to your bed, sinking onto the edge of the mattress, elbows balanced on his knees in frustration.

“What the fuck does all this mean to you?” Touya asks the question through gritted teeth, ashamed by his insecurity and his reliance on your reassurance. He hears a quiet, barely there sound of surprise.

“I…”

Your words trail off and there is silence. The disappointment and shame begins to settle itself into his bones and it’s more painful than he anticipated, really, he should’ve been more prepared for this.

“I care about you. You’re important to me”.

Whatever he’d thought of as the best case scenario, it hadn’t been that. Your confession barely registers, so far fetched it must be a joke.

Your fingers twitch like you want to reach for him but you think the better of it. He feels thoroughly beaten and he can’t bring himself to meet your eyes, the first time since infancy that he has been loved and he can’t accept it.

“Dabi—”

“How could you possibly care about me?” he interrupts incredulously, hands clenched and trembling. “I have nothing to give you!”

Because that’s right, isn’t it? Love is conditional. It’s conditional on what he can give you, how he can be of use to you, and he has nothing in his arsenal to offer. He’s terrified of the sincerity on your face, you must be a brilliant liar, perhaps you’d been lying this entire time. He doesn’t understand what about him you could’ve fallen in love with, he doesn’t trust it. As if approaching a cornered animal you make yourself small and it irritates him. The veil has come down and his mask is cracked, you’ve seen him for who he really is. Weak.

“Love isn’t transactional. I don’t care what you give me, I care because you’re you," you sound so... sad.

“Well you shouldn’t,” he snaps, voice raw and trembling. “I’m not a good person”

“You’re not a bad person, Dabi! You’re hurting—”

“You can’t fix me,” he interrupts, "I'm not a charity case". The thought that you might view him as something broken is nauseating, a distinct feeling of betrayal baring its fangs and sharpening his tongue. You come to a slow stop between his knees and he peers up at you, his chin level with your chest.

“I don’t want to fix you, you aren’t a thing to be fixed,” you tell him.

“Then what do you want from me?” Dabi trembles as the anger subsides, it leaves him naked and flayed before you. To be vulnerable with you is revolting and yet relieving all at once. It’s almost comedic how now, after years of begging to be looked at, you are here seeing him and he’s afraid of it.

“I don’t want anything from you. I want to stay by your side, as a friend or as more if that’s what you want, too”.

“That’s all?”

“That’s all,” you concede reassuringly.

“Sounds like bullshit,” he rasps, grimacing at the sensation of blood welling up between the stitches by his eyes. He wishes he could cry.

“Well I guess I would need you to kiss me every so often,” you muse, cautious but playful in just the same way you’d been when you first met.

“Maybe even text me things other than pictures of stray cats?”

“You’re lucky I even text you at all,” he jokes flatly.

“Yeah,” you reply, “I am”.

The bedroom is dark aside from the light of the hallway. It reflects back at him through your eyes, anticipation swoops into his lower stomach at the fondness you’re so openly bathing him in, and the obvious invitation behind it. He gives in.

“Kiss me again”.

You nod, taking him by the wrists and guiding his hands to your waist. You cradle his face and bend forward toward him, bypassing his lips and littering his chin and cheeks with feather light kisses. The gesture makes his throat swell.

Impatient and overwhelmed he chases the path of your lips, a pleased hum radiating in his chest when your tongue teasingly flicks into his mouth, hot and wet. He tightens his grip on your waist and pulls, your knees dipping the mattress as you climb into his lap without preamble.

Determined, you coax him into the centre of the bed, hands slipping beneath the material of his jacket and sliding it down his shoulders. Without tearing his gaze from you he shucks it off and throws it over the side of the bed, touches growing more confident with each small sound you give him.

Beckoning him along with you as you settle back into the pillows, his forearms come to rest on either side of your head. He feels like he’s burning up but it’s different, the heat engulfs him, it swaddles him and he feels held by it. Held by you. Touya presses his face into the underside of your jaw to lap your pulse, suckling the sensitive skin before abseiling down your neck and leaving soft wet kisses in his wake. Your hands run along the length of his arms, threading up into his hair, smoothing down the back of his shoulders and he pushes into it, his own fingers kneading into the plush of your hips much like a cat.

You push down your pants in haste, shuffling awkwardly out of them and not caring where they end up. He feels his hips rolling down into the mattress to relieve the throbbing of his cock as he pushes the hem of your shirt up, taking your nipple into his mouth. You suck in a sharp breath as you arch into him, back bowed beautifully, knees bending to clamp either side of his waist.

“Dabi,” you mewl. He bristles.

“Touya”.

“Hm?” You pause.

“My name is Touya,” he winces at the break in his words and the quiver in his voice. He nips at the softness of your stomach to distract you both from the admission, tongue nearing the heat between your legs.

“Touya,” you say it slowly, like you’re testing how it feels in your mouth. Used to his name meaning a beating or an apology and now a forbidden word, he has never heard it said with so much affection before.

“Again,” he groans, absentmindedly pulling at his belt buckle with one hand to get it undone, not wanting to tear his gaze away from your face. You clasp his chin between your fingers and heavy lidded you say it again.

Touya, an angered fist gloved in flame heading toward him. Touya, his mother, cowered on the floor where she couldn't look at him. Touya, his younger brother exhausted watching him cry in the middle of the night.

“Touya,” your palm cupping the back of his neck, eyes that truly see him accompanied by a loving smile. Those two things were not to be paired together, he thought, you're dangerous not him. You hold him impossibly close, acting as an anchor as he rolls his hips forward into yours, cock hardening against the material of his pants. A wounded sound reaches his ears before he realises it was him who made it, his palms mapping the curve of your hips and coming around to push open your legs, thumbs massaging your inner thighs.

“Look at you,” he marvels at how pliant you’re being, letting him touch and mould you as he likes. Saliva floods his mouth and he presses his fingers against his own tongue, your eyes following the spit cascading down his wrist. His hand slides further between your legs, hot and teasing, while the other promptly hooks your leg over his shoulder and he turns to press a kiss to the inside of your knee.

His fingers circle your entrance and you exhale deeply, hips lifting to meet him and he presses into you with ease, your head tilting backwards with a relieved moan like your body is telling him ‘finally you’re here’ and it leaves him dizzy. His blood quickens as you pulse around his intrusion and the thought of what you might feel like wrapped around his cock has him grinding against the heel of his palm.

Your fingers curl into the belt hoops of his jeans and tug, urging that he take them off and he certainly isn’t going to argue with that. The relief is palpable when the air of the room hits his legs, kicking the material off into the corner while you enthusiastically pull the material of his shirt over his head.

He’d been so ensnared by you that he hadn’t even considered that you’d never seen the extent of his scars, and he waits for the shock or disgust that might follow. But your expression doesn’t change, the glint of hunger and the neediness of your pawing hands remain the same.

“Lube," you pant, body reluctantly twisting to reach for your bedside table, “want you to fuck me”.

He curses and stretches over the length of your body to pull open the drawer, grabbing it himself, and you murmur a quiet thank you. He lathers it along the length of his cock —it’s cold against his skin but then again what isn’t— and he relaxes his fist when he notices you staring at his little show.

“You want my cock, that it?” he purrs, a thinly veiled taunt, and he finds himself thoroughly enjoying the annoyed narrowing of your eyes. Using the leg thrown over his shoulder you pull him toward you, pelvis circling without shame, voice rough when you bite back.

“You know I do”.

You swallow around the head of his cock effortlessly, a stuttered exhale with your fists twisting in the sheets. He sinks into you frustratingly slowly, eyes squeezed shut and breath held, praying to whatever God would listen so he might hold off his orgasm. With the first rock of his hips his name falls from your lips and it reverberates through him, pebbling his skin, hairs on end. You’re so present with him, mouth brushing any part of his body you can reach, hands restless as they caress his rugged skin, careful as not to catch on his staples, he’d had good sex before but never like this.

Never has he been so cherished before, so overwhelmed and desperate and close to the edge just from the act of someone cradling his face. Your lips crash into his like a wave to land and the momentum has him collapsing into your torso, bodies pressed tightly together and covered in a sheen of sweat. You keen into the crook of his shoulder, the new position all the sweeter for you, and he doesn’t waste time angling his thrusts exactly where you want them to be.

“Shit,” he groans through gritted teeth. There’s a whine building in his chest along with the tightening in his abdomen that chips away at his ego. Fuck he doesn’t want to cum first, not yet, wants to stay inside you a little longer.

“You’re fucking perfect,” he rasps. His tongue dips between your lips, spit running down your chin, and he slips a hand down the front of your stomach to touch you. Your synchronized movement becomes sloppy, a startled moan and you’re clenching deliciously around him.

“Please,” you shudder, lashes fluttering and nails digging into the unmarred skin of his left shoulder, “I’m so cl-ose”.

He fucks into you deeper, pushing you further up the mattress with each stroke of his cock. Your muscles coil tighter and tighter, the sweet scrunching of your nose and crease between your brows as your mouth falls open with a silent cry. You cum incoherently around his cock, earnest in your efforts to keep your eyes open and locked with his, the intimacy of it leaves him aching.

Fighting against the urge to carelessly chase his own release he carries you through your orgasm, gently rolling his hips. He doesn’t know when the descent starts, so different from the sudden snapping sensation he’s used to, it feels like he has been stretched thin and left to slowly reshape himself. He cums and his vision whites out, face buried against your chest with your soft cooing above him, the tension bleeding steadily from his body.

He lifts his head, valiantly ignoring the faint smears of blood along your collar, and you don’t mention the red stains that are likely dried against his cheeks. You look tired, but satisfied, happy.

“You’ll regret loving me,” he falters, black dyed bangs damp and clinging to his forehead. You’ll regret it, he tells himself, so it won’t hurt as much later.

You faintly shake your head no, smile unwavering. “Let me decide that for myself, ok?”

Could it be called defeat if he hadn’t even put up a fight?

“Ok,” he breathes.