A/N: Trigger warning: brief (and very inaccurate) description of medical gore
Also trigger warning for: high school literature, possible flashbacks to dissecting your first frog or gutting your first fish

"Dabi! Phone call for you!" Dabi almost didn't catch the blinged-out phone Toga threw at his face. He narrowed his eyes at her, but took his aggression out on the caller. Who the fuck called without texting first, anyway?

"Dabi," he drawled into the device.

The only human he knew who could perfectly imitate the flat tones of the world's cheapest voice changer answered. "Hi. It's Shouto. I need help."

Dabi's muscles tensed up instinctively at that statement, but he forced himself to relax. He was not going to help the kid. He was a villain; leaving children helpless was in the job description.

But Shouto had always been terrible about asking for help, even as a whiny toddler, and Dabi refused to acknowledge that the brat had undergone even a modicum of self-improvement over the years. To do so would be to imply that the words "Endeavor" and "parenting skills" had any business being in the same paragraph as each other. So Dabi naturally pictured some apocalyptic scenario when he heard those words from his little brother.

Still, Dabi was able to do the mature thing, and hung up.

The phone rang again.

"Dabiii, if you're not going to talk to Shouto-kun, can I?" asked Toga.

That prompted Dabi to press the 'Accept Call' button faster than Twice could split his personality. "What for?"

"I'm sending you a pin," said Shouto. "Meet me there in an hour."

"Are you crazy?" Scratch that question, mental instability might be a genetic trait. "I can't just waltz around the city whenever I please. I'm nocturnal these days."

"Why would you waltz?" asked Shouto. "You don't even know how."

"I could have learned," Dabi said, then shut the topic down with, "You don't know my skill set."

"Does it include wearing a hat and a face mask? Or did you use up all your disguise skills with a box of cheap hair dye?"

Dabi crushed his jaw's desire to drop, because what the fuck. How Shouto could go from stupid to savage in a matter of seconds was baffling. Only one thing was for sure, the kid must not be doing it on purpose.

"I'm busy," he tried next.

"That's not what Toga said."

Dabi glared at the traitor in their midst. Well, the one that wasn't a glorified chicken at any rate. "You're off the vanguard action squad," he mouthed at her.

Toga giggled. "Can't kick me off of something that doesn't exist anymore!"

Dabi flipped her off, and turned back to his phone conversation. "You're not allowed to talk to Toga." For the good of society. Except Dabi didn't care about that, he was a villain. Damn semantics. For the good of what remained of Dabi's sanity, then.

"See you in an hour," said Shouto, and hung up.

Inconsiderate brat. Now Dabi was going to have to go halfway across town, in broad daylight, just to impress upon him the importance of proper phone etiquette. He sighed, already so done with Shouto's shit, and briefly considered another murder, before dismissing it as too much effort.

"You want my help," Dabi said, almost matching Shouto's habitual monotone. "For a book report."

In reply, Dabi got a loud slurp from a nearly-empty cup of bubble tea, the rattling of the straw against the plastic grating on his nerves. Dabi knocked the cup away. Shouto pouted, but only briefly, probably because boba wasn't his preferred foodstuff for passive-aggressive slurping.

"Don't be a brat," Dabi ordered. "Also, why the fuck would you ask the high-school dropout instead of your oh-so-smart UA classmates?"

"This is the book." Shouto pushed the volume across the table to Dabi. Dabi glanced down at the cover, started to read the title, adjusted his reading direction by ninety degrees, and finished reading it. "'Great Expectations'." He stared at Shouto. "I don't speak English."

Shouto turned the book over. "No one speaks English like that. I hope," he grumbled. No wonder the book had looked funny from the start; the spine now on the correct side, Dabi could see the Japanese translation started from the other cover.

As much as Dabi wanted to rub at his temples, he resisted, instead leaning back against the wall of the booth to maximize the effect of the supremely unimpressed look he was fixing on Shouto. "Why me?" he asked again. "You go to UA. I'm sure everyone there deals with certain… expectations."

"It's different," Shouto said, and well, he really didn't need to elaborate on that, thought Dabi morosely. Oh, wait, the kid was still talking. "Even with other hero families, expectations aren't like that. Like his. You know the Iidas, right? Ingenium Agency?"

Dabi sincerely hoped that oversharing like this hadn't become a new habit of Shouto's. Little brothers were unbearable enough as it was. He gave a lazy nod, hoping that would end the conversation.

Shouto babbled on. "Ingenium's brother is in my class. He told me he could have been anything he wanted, his parents would have supported him regardless. Even though he knew early on that he wanted to be a hero."

"That's cute," drawled Dabi. So Shouto apparently still believed in fairy tales, good to know.

Shouto scowled. Or at least Dabi thought he did; the grey eye looked stormier than usual. "His big brother is his hero, too, you know."

Dabi stopped breathing for a second.

Shouto, heathen that he was, picked up the toppled cup, used his Quirk to fill it with ice, and started poking at it with the straw. "That's how its supposed to be," he continued, oblivious. "You're supposed to have a choice. A hero that you choose, not one that's chosen for you."

"You're suddenly very world-wise," Dabi managed. Damn, but he had some phlegm in his throat or something. "What are you trying to say, kid?"

"I just - " Shouto started chewing on the straw. Dabi snatched the cup away from him, fished in one of his pockets, and threw a small thing of hand sanitizer at the idiot. "If I choose what was always expected of me, did I even have a choice in the first place? I tell myself that I want to be a hero. Because of Mom. And because, well… in one important way, I am like Iida."

Dabi snorted, having fully recovered his grim outlook on life. "I can't be your hero, kid. I'm an actual villain."

Shouto shrugged. "Endeavor's my villain and he's an actual hero, so. Besides, you don't get to choose who my heroes are. Dabi."

Dabi tried to keep the guilt over his slip-up off of his face. Months of convincing Shigaraki that he was going along with his stupidly bad planning were finally put to good use.

"Anyway. I was referring to Natsuo. Touya's dead, remember?"

The nerve of the little bastard. The only thing Natsuo was a hero of was of leaving his Legos all over the floor of Touya's room to be stepped on. Dabi glared contemptuously at Shouto.

"You should read the book," Shouto continued, unfazed. "Then you'll get what I'm talking about, and why I can't discuss it properly with my classmates."

Dabi wasn't exactly eager to take a walk down childhood trauma lane just so he could talk to Shouto about a book written by someone who'd been dead for a couple centuries. "That doesn't sound like fun," he said, standing and grabbing his hand sanitizer back. He placed the ball cap with the Greenpeace logo back on his head and grabbed the accompanying clipboard, the combination of which ensured that no one would dare look him in the eye, and prepared to leave. "Goodbye. Oh, and don't talk to Toga anymore."

"Why not? I'm learning a lot about anatomy from her."

Dabi's smooth exit was abruptly cancelled. "You what?!" He sorely missed the coattail flare that would have accompanied his whirl, had he been in his usual clothes. "You're so grounded."

Shouto had the gall to look offended. "But sometimes it gets really hard! Who doesn't need a hand with stuff like that once in a while."

"Oh my God, no," Dabi groaned, collapsing back into the booth and willing the ground to swallow him up.

"The images she sends me are quite helpful, you know."

Dabi wondered how quickly he could scorch his own eardrums out, or if it was possible to cremate the pictures that were now popping up in his brain.

"Some body parts might not appear to go together at first glance, but with a detailed enough illustration -"

"Give me your phone," Dabi demanded, sitting up and extending a hand. He was going to burn it, along with whatever indecent images Toga had been sexting him with, and then he was going to find Toga and pick a form of manslaughter.

"What? No!" Shouto put a protective hand over the device. Dabi reached for it anyway, and found his hand suddenly frozen to a small column of ice.

"I'm not letting you get R-rated texts from a psycho!" he growled, busy de-frosting.

Shouto looked at Dabi as if he were the psycho. "It's anatomy. There's going to be some gore -"

"So they are R-rated?" Dabi fixated on the important point.

"I suppose so," said Shouto, slowly. "I don't rate my texts."

Dabi remembered then that he had two hands, and grabbed the phone with his non-frozen one while Shouto was distracted. He quickly opened the messaging app and scrolled through Shouto's chat history with Toga, keeping the kid at bay with a sharp elbow as he did so.

Oh, this was not good.

It was, however, not what Dabi had thought it was, which his cardiovascular system, seconds away from a heart attack, was grateful for. "These are… incredibly graphic," he summed up, finally letting Shouto have his phone back.

"I might have failed the dissection module without her pointers," Shouto supplied, although he had the decency to look faintly repulsed at the image on-screen, which showed the shoulder area of someone with a wing-like Quirk. Dashed lines showed preferred patterns for incision, and a bloody inset illustrated what one would find underneath, with notations marking key muscle groups and veins. "I had no idea how much thought went into proper scalpel technique. Oh, and it gave me an idea for close combat using my Quirk, too. What do you think?"

Suddenly there was both a crazed look in Shouto's mismatched eyes and an icy dagger in his right hand. Clear proof that Dabi had been right all along, and Shouto should not, under any circumstances, be allowed to communicate with Toga.

Still…

Dabi nonchalantly lit twin daggers of blue flame in his fists, and raised a bored eyebrow at Shouto.

"Wow, bro, you're so manly," monotoned Shouto.

Dabi choked, fire going out. "Who are you and what have you done with my - with Todoroki Shouto."

"That's what one of my friends would say," said Shouto, sounding far too pleased with himself. "I've learned that doing impressions of one's friends is considered an essential social skill."

Dabi stood up, finally giving in to the urge to rub his temples. "Right," he sighed. "I'm leaving now. And I'm only taking this book because stake-outs are super boring, not because I want to have anything to do with you and your so-called personal growth. Which, for the record, I think is very much heading in the wrong direction."

Shouto practically beamed at him. In the Todoroki household, this meant that both corners of his mouth were turned distinctly upwards. "I think you could learn a lot from it. After all, the whole Stain ideology is very Dickensian."

Dabi snorted, shaking water off his clipboard. "That's not a real word. I thought you were supposed to be smart."

"I thought you didn't speak English."

"You're Dickensian," Dabi shot back, having no better ammunition currently than a word containing the word 'dick'.

"Perhaps." Shouto seemed to be giving that idea way too much thought. "So, I'll come over next week? Same place?"

Dabi turned towards the door with a lazy wave.

It wasn't a no.

"Holy shit," Dabi said to himself later, after making use of a translator and a dictionary. "This fucking apartment really is Dickensian."

A/N: Up next: Literary LARPing, accidental boyfriend acquisition, and a running joke is born.

My sincerest apologies. This piece of trash writing has somehow acquired a plot, but I will do my best to keep it buried under sufficient layers of comedy.