"Courier service." A muffled deep voice accompanied the sharp rap on the door.
"Ooooh, my #11 titanium reusables are finally here!" Dabi winced at Toga's high-pitched squeal, and went back to his very important brooding-in-a-corner as the door squeaked open. "Oh hey, cutie! Do I know you?"
"Delivery for Todoroki Touya," came the voice of Todoroki fucking Shouto. Dabi suddenly had a lot more to brood about.
"But that's your name, honey," continued Toga, who had now predictably pulled out a knife. "Isn't it? Hey, Twice, it's one of the pretty boys from the dossier!"
Dabi hid his face behind a flaming hand, debating whether to sweep dramatically towards the door to throw his little brother out on his ass or to quietly slink off to his room and leave Toga to her favorite hobby. The first option won out because he didn't want to have to deal with Toga tormenting him in the shape of Shouto. One kid brother was enough for any busy villain.
Good thing he always wore his coat inside this freezing shithole. "What the hell are you talking about, kid?" Dabi growled, with maximum menace in the form of coattail flare, as he approached the doorway.
Shouto was casually sidestepping Toga and toeing off his shoes, not even having the decency to use the guest slippers and claiming Shigaraki's for himself. "Hi Touya," he said, blankly.
"Hee hee, no, that's just Dabi," said Toga helpfully.
"What she said," Dabi echoed, igniting a second palm because apparently Shouto couldn't take a hint.
"Sure, Touya," droned Shouto, and dropped a parcel into Dabi's outstretched palms. Dabi snuffed his flames and caught it, out of instinct, allowing Shouto to slip past him and park himself on the couch. The fucking nerve. Dabi almost didn't snag Toga's collar as she leapt after Shouto, knife outstretched.
"Awwww, c'mon Dabs, let me cut on him just a little!"
"No, I'm going to light him on fire now," hissed Dabi, dropping the package and drawing himself up to loom threateningly. Shouto had the audacity to be almost as tall as him, showing off the recently acquired height even in his elegant sprawl on the couch as he scrolled through his phone. Puberty had hit the kid like a goddamned Instagram filter, couldn't the universe have let Dabi have this one thing?
"Didn't think you'd be stealing Endeavor's lines until much later in life, Dabs," said the little shit. "Oh well. You know what they say about fathers and sons."
Dabi blinked, hard. "Bitch, you're Endeavor's son."
Shouto tilted his head, finally making bored eye contact. "Technically correct. I haven't thought of myself that way in a long time, since I've always been more of an object to him."
Although Dabi could relate hard to the trials of his blood relation, he refused to acknowledge it. "And you're telling me you're not still his perfect little project, all top-of-your class at his precious alma mater?"
"If that's your way of asking if I'm smarter than you, the answer is yes."
Hey, it wasn't Dabi's fault that he'd never finished high school. And he had street smarts, a faculty in which Shouto was on par with the concrete the streets were made of. "How dumb do you have to be to think that's what I meant?" demanded Dabi.
"Dumb enough to know you, smart enough to not want to be you."
"Burn," sneered a new voice, and Dabi swung to face Twice with a handful of blue flame. He saw Jin's eyes shift off to the left, and then back to Dabi, and Dabi groaned, seeing an identical handful of orange flame out of his periphery. He put the fire out.
"Is this really your little brother, Dabi?" asked Toga, who'd taken refuge behind Jin. "I wanna see him bleed!"
"Yes, we're brothers," volunteered Shouto.
"No, we're not brothers!" shouted Dabi.
Jin and Toga looked between them, and then fixed Dabi with disbelieving stares. Damn it, Dabi knew he should've invested in tinted contacts as well.
"He's not my little brother, and I've never seen this asshole before in my life!" he added, for clarification.
"Uh… that's clearly false," said Jin's more rational persona.
Shit. He'd forgotten about the forest thing. "Okay, I've seen him before, but everyone's seen him before. Who can forget such a bad dye job?" Dabi gestured emphatically at Shouto's weird hair.
"Still better than yours," the kid grumbled.
"Burn," said Jin, back to agent of chaos.
"This," yelled Dabi, fully annoyed into losing his cool, aloof villain persona, "Is my natural color!"
"Of your heart," supplied Shouto, still monotone. "You haven't called your mother for ten years."
Even Toga looked scandalized at that, and she'd straight up murdered her mother. That fucker Jin had produced a whiteboard out of nowhere, and was currently adding a third tick a hastily drawn column titled 'You Suck'. His slightly deranged gaze caught Dabi's own as he gestured meaningfully towards the empty column with the header, "You Rule".
Dabi couldn't believe these people.
Or that sweet little Shouto had become such an insufferable prick. One more thing to hate Endeavor for, Dabi supposed, although he suspected most of the blame for whatever passed for a personality lay with Shouto. "Toga, slice him up good, I don't know this little shit and I sure as hell don't like him." Dabi donned the Big Brother grin that had been able to put the fear of God into a prank-loving Natsuo.
Shouto blinked, face barely shifting from its impression of a paving stone as Toga flipped open a switchblade and traipsed forward. "Do you have something bigger?" he asked.
Toga stopped, confused, and glanced at Dabi for some reason. Dabi shrugged, having no idea what the kid was on about.
"That knife," Shouto explained. "It's really tiny. Borderline insulting. Didn't you have someone with a giant sword made out of other swords? Can they cut me up instead? I do need a haircut, and they say it's always best to do that with sharper implements."
"Oh, lemme get Spinner! This will be so. Much. FUN!" squealed Toga, clapping her hands in glee before running to get Shuichi.
Dabi repressed a violent urge to rub at his approaching headache, and did his best to resume his trademarked pose of threatening nonchalance, leaning up against the wall with crossed arms. He commenced a stare-down with heterochromatic eyes.
… Shouto was really good at staring. Dabi squashed down a flutter of pride that his isolated baby brother had finally progressed to middle school levels of social intelligence.
Dabi immediately rescinded that assessment when Toga came back with Spinner. Shouto was an idiot, who clearly didn't know the first thing about self-preservation.
Still staring a burning hole into Dabi's already burnt face, Shouto extended his arm towards Spinner. The lizard-man hadn't quite gotten his all-in-one weapons-cache back up to its previous standard, but it still resembled a medieval torture device when he took it out of its canvas covering.
Dabi didn't surrender his stare-down with Shouto, but he could picture the looks of gleeful anticipation and sadistic curiosity on Toga's and Shuichi's faces. He himself wasn't letting his expression waver from a cocky smirk, although Shouto was up to the challenge, displaying all the emotion of a frozen fish.
Even though they were, apparently, playing chicken now, but with more knives. Well, one thing was for sure, thought Dabi, resolute. He wasn't going to be the one to get chopped.
Having a willing victim, Spinner was taking it slow, breaking the skin of Shouto's left arm almost gently. A line of red dripped down the blade, and Toga licked her lips. Dabi told himself very firmly that he did not give a shit. Anyway, it was Shouto's fire side and he'd always hated that Quirk. Who was Dabi to stand in the way of a good old-fashioned teenaged rebellion -
The knife slipped deeper, and Shouto sucked in a sharp breath.
"Stop!" shouted Dabi, body moving before he knew properly what he was doing. "Don't hurt him!"
Force of fucking habit, he supposed, he'd spent so long throwing himself between his baby brother and proverbial knives that Dabi shouldn't have been surprised to find himself doing it for real. Too little, too late, he knew, disarming Spinner with a burst of flame and yanking Shouto away from Toga and her needles. The brat was what, fourteen now, and sure Dabi could save him from these two-bit villain extras, but that didn't make up for the fact that he'd done exactly nothing but focus on his own survival and revenge while Shouto was growing up under the claws of an actual monster.
Keeping his grip on Shouto's wrist, Dabi frog-marched the surprised teenager into the nearest room and slammed the door, before whirling on his little brother. "Shouto, you little shit."
The kid's eyes lit up as the mask he'd been so careful to wear ever since Endeavor (ever since Touya left, ever since Mom was taken away too) shattered to dust, and a shy, familiar smile crept to the corners of his lips. "Hi, Touya."
Dabi was moving on instinct now, and his instincts were not to be trusted anymore than that Hawks fucker, and Dabi was sure to get burned if he kept this up. From fire or ice, it didn't matter. It would come eventually, as it always did.
He scrubbed a hand across tired eyes, feeling the motion pull at his staples, and reached up (damn it, he used to never have to do that) to push on the top of Shouto's head. A small expression of surprise crossed the kid's face as he immediately folded to sit cross-legged on the ground, body remembering the motions of a decade ago.
"Listen, squirt," Dabi grumbled, turning to go through the cabinets. They were in the apartment's shoddy kitchen - Shouto was probably going to catch some disease from sitting on that floor, but whatever - which meant there were sure to be bandages somewhere. Side-effects of life with Toga. "Todoroki Touya's dead." The name itself left a sour taste in his mouth. "So what makes you think that I'm him?"
Dabi's cover was tissue-thin at this point, but he'd cling to that semblance of normalcy with everything he had. Shouto was doing the same, he knew, and they were both stubborn bastards. Dabi could and would keep this up till the grave if he had to.
"It was pretty obvious to Fuyumi and Natsuo," said Shouto. "Especially after I told them that you knew my name."
"We're villains, not incompetents," Dabi scoffed, finally locating a tube of antiseptic and a roll of gauze, then crouching down beside Shouto. "We've got our dossiers same as heroes do."
"Which fully explains the way you said it," mused Shouto, tone dry as Shigaraki's skin. Dabi jerked his eyes up from examining Shouto's cut, almost guiltily wiping his expression free of thoughts (rage, guilt, pity, jealousy, annoyance, poor little Todoroki Shouto) and meeting a… smirk in those mismatched eyes.
"Fuck you," Dabi drawled, attempting and failing to be rougher than necessary with the antiseptic. "That's some fake-Moon-landing conspiracy-level bullshit reasoning."
"Oh, and you remember Natsuo's in University now?"
Dabi was not going to fall for that bait. He stayed silent, taping sutures across the slash. Kid should probably get stitches, but Dabi didn't trust any of Toga's needles further than he could throw them.
"He's really smart," continued Shouto. "So he ran a few facial recognition algorithms. You're lucky the police doesn't have any of your old pictures."
Dabi did not swallow nervously, and was not for the slightest millisecond grateful to Endeavor for his efforts to wipe his oldest son's existence from the face of the Earth. "Touya's dead," he said again, instead, stepping back after he finished wrapping the gauze and tape.
"Speaking of which." Shouto stood and dug into his messenger bag with his right hand - so he hadn't been as comfortable in this den of villainy as he'd projected, the kid had been ready to bolt the whole time, Dabi noted smugly - and fished something out.
Dabi caught the heavy packet of papers that Shouto shoved at his chest. "What's this?"
"That's from Fuyumi," said Shouto. "Ten years' worth of medical insurance forms, unpaid library fines, your immunization card and dental record, five years' worth of incomplete tax returns -"
"Good thing I'm not Todoroki Touya," smirked Dabi, shoving the papers back at Shouto.
He got a raised white eyebrow reminiscent of Fuyumi herself in response. "You're disowning us because you don't want to do your taxes?"
"Dead people don't have to do taxes."
"That's not true," insisted Shouto, who Dabi knew for sure had zero experience with adulting. "'Nothing is certain but death and taxes,'" he quoted in English, the show-off, and pushed the papers back at Dabi.
"So not fucking fair," groaned Dabi, filching the immunization card from the stack before dumping the rest back in Shouto's bag. God, when was the last time he'd had a tetanus shot? Certainly not recently enough to keep up with Toga. To say nothing of his damned staples falling out every other week, and surgical steel was a valuable commodity in the villain world.
"Anyway, Endeavor can pay the death tax for the son he murdered," he added, turning around to poke through the cabinets once more. Dabi felt the powerful urge to pour an indecent amount of alcohol down his throat.
"You could go to jail for tax evasion," argued Shouto.
Dabi spun to face him. "You're kidding, right? I've murdered actual people, Shouto. I could go to jail anyway."
The kid just shrugged. "Sure, but I've heard tax evaders get it worse in prison. Some people deserve to be murdered, but by not doing your taxes you're just stealing from all of society."
"The fuck are they teaching you in that school," sighed Dabi, finally locating an unlabeled brown bottle. He spun off the lid and sniffed the contents. He promptly put the lid back on. "And since when did you care for 'all of society'? Hasn't that society allowed someone like End -"
Shit, Dabi wasn't even drunk and he was already letting down his guard. "I mean," he corrected hastily. "You're the Number One Hero's favorite kid. You're at the top of society, so why should you give a shit about what happens to the rest of us?"
That didn't deserve a response and Shouto didn't even try, the lazy-ass. "Anyhow," he said, back to the monotone. "The care package you left out there is also from Fuyumi, but I helped a little. Natsuo just says 'fuck you too, dude, you owe me a shitton of birthday cards'. We haven't told Mom about you yet because we're decent human beings. I don't think Endeavor knows either, but I'm pretty sure he wants to kill you. Or maybe he wants me to kill you. It's all a bit jumbled together in my head."
Dabi narrowed his eyes at this information dump which was honestly just his dysfunctional family to a T. "The fuck did he do to you?" he snapped.
"What didn't he," answered Shouto, mildly, before looking pointedly at Dabi. "Hasn't killed me yet, though."
Touché.
They all had their different coping mechanisms. Fuyumi pretended everything was okay, Natsuo hightailed it out of there as soon as he was legal and rarely looked back, and Shouto… well, if the last ten minutes were any indication, Shouto coped by being a sarcastic asshole extraordinaire with a maximum of two facial expressions.
Touya coped by being dead, and honestly it felt like the easiest option.
"Eh," Dabi said, really trying to maintain his trademark suave. "How… your siblings."
Curse that white eyebrow. "Probably… they'd be pretty let down if you told them… Touya's still dead."
"I doubt it. They got used to the idea that he's a villain fairly quickly."
"Idiots." Dabi was certain he successfully kept every scrap of fondness out of his tone. "Are they going to be okay?"
"You can ask them yourself. Fuyumi put our contact info in the care package, too."
"Idiots," repeated Dabi, with feeling. Todorokis had never been known for their stellar self-preservation instincts, but out of the four of them Fuyumi and Natsuo had seemed to know something about keeping themselves safe. And giving their phone numbers to a known member of the League of Villains… God, where was an older sibling to slap some sense into them when they needed it?
Oh.
Dabi really needed that drink now. "I'm not your brother." I can't be your brother. "What do you want from me, kid?" he asked instead. "Just… just give it to me straight."
Of all the things he could have said to cause Shouto to freeze up, that was somehow the one thing. Shouto stood stock still for at least half a minute, a strange almost-expression on his face.
"Uh… what are you doing?" Dabi asked after a while, waving a hand in front of the unmoving face. He briefly considered lighting said hand on fire, but he was a villain, not a total dick. Even though he'd apparently managed to completely break Shouto where years of life with Endeavor hadn't (or had it?).
"Thinking," Shouto replied, coming back with a blink. "I've never considered my sexuality before, and I don't know how it pertains to the context of my siblings and what I want from them."
Dabi was so glad he hadn't drunk anything because he would've spit it out, which was the epitome of not suave.
"What. The fuck," he said slowly. "Are you talking about?" And also, please don't, he thought, feeling a twinge of pain shoot through his temple. His memories of Shouto were largely of the other as a small child, and Dabi didn't ever want to have to hear any word starting with sex come out of that mouth as long as he lived. Which would be a damn long time, just to spite the brat.
"You told me to give it to you straight. What if I can't, because I'm not?"
"Oh my God, Shouto. You really are that dumb. I'm definitely not related to you."
"You used a word with multiple meanings," Shouto accused. "I've been told I should be aware that seemingly simple words are frequently used as innuendo."
Dabi was torn between setting something (preferably Endeavor) on fire and melting down against the grubby wall in total defeat. He'd known Shouto had been kept isolated, but how on earth had the kid managed to get into UA without possessing basic human intelligence? Oh, right. Connections and a God-tier Quirk would probably do that. "I meant, be honest and tell me why you're here. Besides delivering paperwork for me to burn," Dabi said, employing the tried-and-true Todoroki family strategy of ignoring their issues.
Now it was Shouto's turn to look uncomfortable. To his credit, it barely showed, but the way he was shifting his weight from side to side was a tell he'd kept from childhood. "I don't want things to be like they were," he started. "Things were horrible, and… and there's no going back anyway. I don't think it helps to dwell on the past. We all - Fuyumi, Natsuo, and I - we lost ten years of knowing you. So we… I… want to start that again."
Because it was that simple, Dabi thought viciously. They could just pick up where they left off, not caring that Dabi was a villain and Mom was in a hospital and Shouto was a hero-in-training. That the things that happened in the last decade didn't matter.
"You don't get to talk about what you lost." Dabi folded his arms across his chest, feeling the movement pull at the staples holding him together. Like most movements did these days.
Shouto's tone was sharp with challenge when he spoke. "An older brother? The only person left who stood up for me against a father who…"
He took a breath, schooling his features back into the mask. "You're right, I didn't lose much. I barely even knew him."
That was it, then. Time to take the out, tell the kid to let Touya stay dead, and forget this whole crazy encounter ever happened. It would be for the best. So why did Dabi find himself wavering? He'd never hesitated before to do what needed to be done.
"Your older brother sounds like a real dick."
"Sometimes he is," agreed Shouto, and fuck, that stupid look was back. The barest hint of a child's admiration for his idol, unconditional love for his certified, grade-A jerk of a brother.
"Get out of here," Dabi choked out what he'd meant to say in the first place. "Don't try to find me again. Forget you ever saw me, talked to me, forget you were ever here, and next time I see you out there don't get in my way, because I will fight you. And I don't mean to lose."
A flash of something crossed Shouto's face, before he nodded stiffly. He set the packet of papers on the counter - Dabi didn't have the energy to set them on fire right now, but trust him, he would - and turned to go.
"What do you want me to call you?" Shouto turned back to ask, hand on the door handle.
"Don't," bit out Dabi.
Shouto opened the door.
"Touch him and you're toast!" yelled Dabi to the hovering vultures on the other side.
"Good one, Dabi." Dabi could've sworn that Shouto's quiet voice held traces of a snicker. Insolent little fucker, just had to get in the last word. Dabi leaned on the counter, briefly rubbing at his temples. The only good thing to come out of the encounter - besides whatever goodies Fuyumi had left in the care package - was that now Dabi had fresh material to brood over for days.
He heard the door to the apartment creak shut behind Shouto, and that was that.
Or so Dabi thought.
A/N: Shouto, pondering while in class: Dabi told me to fuck off and stay out of his way, but he also wants to fight me and win. *looks over at Bakugou* OMG he wants to be friends.