It was too goddamn noisy in here. The lights were dim, but he had been told by a man he knew now was a damn liar that things would be nice and quiet. Instead, the place was bustling with activity, nearly every booth and table seating several patrons. He didn't know most of these faces, though he recognized one or two. Villains, low level street punks like Bedazzle and Longshock, the sort of cannon fodder miscreants Shigaraki would've used as meat shields in one of his bigger raids. They were sat all around at tables and in booths, sipping shitty beer and talking about their inconsequential little crimes, bragging about petty robberies and muggings.
Dabi hated this place. It was the sort of shit bar he would have skipped out on completely if it hadn't been for the promise of a safe place to drink. He was a wanted man still, and with Shigaraki missing, Compress in prison and Kurogiri vanished into thin air, he was one of the only League members left on the wanted lists, pushing him up much higher than he was used to. Usually arson cases netted you a mid-grade ranking, but with the Yakuza in free fall and the League completely broken...
Dabi took another sip of the watered down piss this hole called beer and sighed. It had been a halfway decent run at first; strike a little fear into the hearts of their foes, break a couple heads here and there, get people talking... Japan had just started to understand the danger the League represented. And then...
"Tomura fucking Shigaraki."
The words were spoken in a murmur, a near-silent remark on a dead man. Dabi wasn't sure how it had happened; Toga might have knifed him one, maybe Twice finally snapped, or hell; Deku could've gone off the deep end. Heroes killed. Not a lot, but it was known to happen. Some more than others.
Others much more still.
Fire on his back and in his hands. A promise to remember. He sighed and took another drink, closing his eyes and doing his level best to wash the memories away, back into the pitch black sinkhole of his subconscious. The bar's noise was fading a little. Good. This was beer number three; maybe he was finally getting a buzz going, drowning out some of that infernal racket. Or was it beer number four? He had started to forget the little things like that more often.
The table shook, and he opened his eyes to see a girl sitting opposite him. A little thing, the sort of skinny that told him she was hungry rather than petite. Mousy looking, cute in a plain sort of way, face half hidden behind messy pink hair the colour of reds washed with whites. He stared at her with cold eyes for a moment, and she managed to meet his gaze for about half a second before looking down at the table. She was wearing a puffy red jacket; made sense in January, at least for a normal person. It was stained and clearly well worn, but it looked warm enough.
Dirty fingers nervously danced in her lap. He couldn't see them but he knew the type well enough to understand she was fidgeting. He cast an idle eye about the bar to see if she wasn't here with a group, but the absence of any giggling girls her age told him she wasn't doing this on a dare. He turned his eyes back to her and she looked down again, letting out a tiny squeak.
"What do you want?" he asked, deadpan.
She moved her lips but words didn't come out for a few moments, and she closed them again. They opened, she made more lip movements without any sound, then they closed. She repeated that three times, but in the fourth time around she managed to whisper something he couldn't quite make out.
"Say that again." he said. "Louder."
She swallowed, closed her eyes, and turned her head a few degrees upward to stare at the table in front of his beer, rather than the table in front of her chest.
"You-you're... Dabi..." she whispered. "You're… amazing…"
Dabi stared at her for a moment, saw the red flush in her cheeks and the way she couldn't even look at him in the eye, then hiked a thumb over his shoulder.
"Not in the mood for fangirls." he said. "Beat it, kid."
"Oh, Brand, darling, I told you to stick to the script!"
A new voice called out, much louder than Dabi or the girl, before a man sauntered up to the table with a worryingly sensual sway in his hips. A tall man, thin and wiry wearing a long grey trench coat left undone at the front so Dabi could see he was wearing a black button up shirt underneath. The man's hair was a shock of yellow the same shade as straw, his eyes a bizarrely vivid orange. His hand slapped down on the table as he slung himself into the booth beside the girl, who squeaked with surprise and slid all the way up against the wall, as if hiding herself from the man.
He wasn't familiar to Dabi, not really, which meant that he had never really met this man before. Dabi had a decent head for faces, and this guy was pretty memorable in all the ways the interesting ones usually were. So he took another long sip from his shitty beer and laid it back down on the table, blue eyes narrowing as he stared the stranger down.
"Script?" he repeated, and the blond man's smile grew unnervingly wide.
"Oh, just the usual recruitment spiel," he said, giving the word 'spiel' the same intonation most people reserved for words such as 'fuck' and 'shit' all while waving his hand in a dismissive sort of way. "But Tri-Blaze said you were way too important for that crap, so Brand and I, she's Brand by the way," he gave the girl's arm a good shake, inciting a flinch from her, before slapping the table again. "Came up with something a lot more interesting."
Dabi idly noted he could smell something off in the air, something strangely like the metallic stink of kerosene. He said nothing, however, simply bringing his beer back up and sipping from it. Both Brand and the stranger watched him do so, the former with that same quiet intrigue in her eyes and the latter with expectation plain in his gaze.
"Recruitment for what?"" Dabi asked.
"That's where things get interesting…" the stranger put his hands together and then set them flat on the table, and Dabi noticed the right was covered by a glove made of something that looked like white silk. "Ever heard of a little group called the Inferno Assembly?"
Dabi had; there weren't many people like him who hadn't. In the time before All Might, they had been one of the most fearsome villain gangs, alongside groups like Red Sun Rising and the Black Metal Coalition. Defined by their membership being limited to fire Quirks and users thereof, they had burnt down at least half of Tokyo once upon a time. Nowadays, though? Dabi never heard anything about them. Nobody did.
"Here and there," he admitted, shrugging. "It isn't like they've done much lately."
"Yeah, All Might kinda put a damper on our activities…" the stranger admitted, shrugging. "But the boss lady figures that with him retired and a dumpster-burn like Endeavour front and centre, the Assembly could come back in a big way."
"And what do I have to do with a bunch of washed up arsonists wanting to get their rocks off by burning down office buildings?" Dabi asked bluntly, looking the man right in those unnervingly bright blue eyes. "The last two villain organizations that tried to make waves got shut down hard. Yakuza's been knocked out and the League is gone. What makes you think you'll fare any better?"
The stranger's smile changed then. Formerly it had been mischievous and cunning, a trickster's grin. Now though… his eyes darkened, and there was real malice behind that smile. The girl named Brand shivered, and Dabi saw her pull her hands back into her pockets.
"Yakuza got too auspicious," the stranger declared. "And the League was run by a nutjob playing kingpin. The Assembly's different. We don't wanna stamp out Quirks or rebuild the world or some shit… we just wanna set it all on fire and piss on the ashes."
"Burn it, burn it, burn it all…" the girl whispered in a sing-song way, Dabi straining a little to hear her. "Every brick and beam…"
"Every fuckin' beam…" the stranger echoed, before pointing at Dabi with a finger sheathed in white silk. "So… you in?"
Dabi finished his beer. Given that he had half a glass left, that took a little while, and both Brand and the stranger watched him with baited breath and expectant eyes. Brand looked fit to burst with excitement, or perhaps concern, fidgeting in her seat. The stranger just smiled, back to the mischievous grin of the previous two minutes as if he hadn't just shot Dabi a look that could kill a man stone dead.
Dabi set his glass down with a clunk. All around them, the bar seemed quieter, though there was still a buzz of a few dozen conversations lost to the haze of the beer and the general exhaustion that lingered deep inside him. He was so fucking tired. Tired of villains. Tired of heroes.
Tired of fire.
"You promised," said the voice of a dead boy, one that only he could hear, one that only he had ever heard. "You said you'd make him burn. You promised me."
"No dice." Dabi said aloud, standing up and sliding out of his booth. "I see what you're trying to do. And I'm done playing flunky. I've gone solo."
Brand looked disappointed, her eyes drooping. Then, much to Dabi's interest, a wash of fear seemed to overcome her, and she shivered in the way only the truly terrified could. The stranger, meanwhile, just sighed.
"Then you'd better skedaddle," he warned, voice amused. "This place is primed to blow."
Dabi smelled it again, then; something flammable in the air itself, slowly growing thicker and ever more cloying. He took an involuntary step back, suppressing the innate desire to start a fire, and the stranger smirked at his reaction before walking to the door. Brand followed, hugging herself with her hands, and Dabi watched them both walk away before following.
Right as he reached the door, the stranger turned around, throwing his arms wide as if about to embrace the entire room. He turned his head up and smiled again.
"Ladies and gentlemen, a moment if you will!" he called, drawing the attention of every man and woman present, several dozen heads turning to look at him where he stood before the only visible exit. "I have some exciting news to share with you all, concerning a most esteemed establishment of villainous origin!"
Nobody said a word, and slowly he folded his left arm behind his back while raising his right, his hand flexing in front of his face before he raised his index finger and pointed to the ceiling.
"Perhaps you've heard whispers and rumours and hearsay, but I have been sent by the esteemed Emberette to clear the air completely!" He chuckled at that, while Dabi eyed one of the windows and began edging towards it. "Our long-dormant organization is happy to announce that we will be making a resurgence, given the current climate, and we do hope you're as excited as we are to see our explosive rebirth!"
People began to stand now, the one-eyed man who was also the bartender reaching under his bar to search for something with his hands, but Dabi realized what was coming. He knew the man now, by his frankly disgustingly obvious modus operandi. The flamboyant gestures, the scent of kerosene, the white fucking glove...
"The Inferno Assembly sends its fondest regards!" Snapdragon, a man wanted on no less than thirty-four confirmed cases of arson, shouted as he brought his thumb and middle finger together. "Thank you… and good night!"
He snapped his fingers and Dabi hit the window shoulder first, throwing himself free of the bar as the snap-hiss-roar of something igniting filled the air behind him. The resultant blast of heat sent him flying, tumbling across the abandoned midnight street in a wash of glass shards and smoke. He hit the pavement with a heavy thud, and did his best to roll away from the building before coming to a dead stop atop the yellow line in the middle of the road. He sat up and looked at the bar, seeing that it was quite intensely ablaze, with tongues of red and yellow licking out of the broken windows. The fire reflected off the countless glass shards scattered in the street, turning the whole road into a sort of bizarre mural.
Dabi pulled himself up to his feet, dusting off his singed jacket and watched the fire he hadn't started burn away for a time. It was painfully familiar to see, the promise he'd made echoing in his head before he turned away.