A/N: Something I've had on my mind for a while now. Enjoy - and please do leave a little review to make my day!

Warning: Allusions to violent sex.

Dying, Dying, Dying

All of them were killers. One way or another, they'd all killed parts of themselves because at some point, somewhere, something had to die in order for them to stay alive. And Dabi knew it better than anyone. He knew that monsters weren't born but created; that it had been by licking his wounds – charred and heavy with the rawest, most oozing form of education – that he'd inherited a taste for blood in its purest variety.

Indeed, monsters were slowly formed like feed in the fire: sacrificed to the heat of callous memories and false ideals, burned up by echoes of cruelty inflicted until only embers of a once-was-self remained. Simmering and blackened, but with crimson-gold through their veins like the blood of young victims. Monsters were made – ruined and reborn in hatred, in shattered family portraits and hidden heirlooms – and Dabi knew it better than anyone. He knew that his was a body of burning sinews and a failing heart, organs collapsing one upon another in a farcical attempt at living.

He liked the crunch of necks beneath his boots, and terrified eyes, and bloodied lips quivering under his gaze.

The smell of flesh as it burned, blue flames carving welts and his name into the backs of heroes.

Once, before, Dabi had liked the feeling of his mother's hands – her fingertips cold and gentle over the places marred by his father's legacy. He'd liked his sister's cooking and ball-games with his little brother. A boy. He'd been a boy once, in all the warming glow of innocence. Scuffed knees from climbing trees and bruises from childish play; not bloodied knuckles and bite marks as the insignias of innocence lost. The taste of homemade meals and the smell of his mother's perfume – now replaced by the burn of cigarette smoke down his throat, and alcohol, and leaching crimson in shades like gemstones.

He'd no longer feel his mother's touch against the rough texture of his face. His sister and brother wouldn't be able bear seeing themselves reflected in his eyes.

Over and over, Dabi had died. He'd died and died and died, sometimes screaming, sometimes not – until at last he could recognise nothing of himself, nothing but the poisonous blue staring back at him from the mirror. Blue that danced over his palms. Blue that seared itself across photographs and long-gone faces in a brilliant display of monstrous hate. Dabi hated everyone and himself. Dabi liked it.

To defeat monsters one had to become the greater monster – and so he acquired a taste for screams and tears, for suffering. A suffering that made his own seem pale, palatable, so that he could watch the world around him burn while forgetting that he himself was a mess of wretched storms and bile. Of broken galaxies and the weight of his father's beliefs across his back in a scorched, bruising purple. Dabi became the judge, jury, executioner, and the weapon to carry out the sentence: the last thing they'd ever see. Smelling of smoke. A sturdy silhouette in the dream-lit light of a sapphire blaze.

Monsters weren't born. They were made.

Just like him.

Though sometimes, maybe – just maybe– monsters weren't made but were born.

Just like her, the girl with the heartless laugh and the flash of golden hair.

Wicked smile of sharpened teeth. Sing-song voice, harsh and jagged as though rung with shards of glass: the phantoms of abandoned playgrounds and empty swing sets. She got under Dabi's skin like nobody else, clawing through his veins in a seething, sugar-spun chassé. Brat. Bat-shit crazy, and with all the goddamn sweetness of dandelions – all the grace of a flower, golden and soft and fragile; all the venom of serpents, dripping from her lips in a metallic glinting of ruby. That was the thing about her, Dabi knew. She had knife wounds etched into her bones and blood dripping from her fists: born to hunt and born to destroy.

And it haunted him, the way she looked holy and divine, the way she burned and writhed and stained herself red in savagery. Death followed her like a perfume. There was the scorching heat of the sun in her eyes, rimmed by a cosmic darkness deeper than any of Dabi's scars. And he envied her for it – for her nature, how she wore blood like a second skin rather than like a desperate mask of war-paint. She cared nothing for vengeance nor for the glow of watching her enemies go up in flames. Unencumbered with past lives, no before-and-after to mark the design of her catastrophe: she was her own original source and creator. An explosion of dark matter without beginning or end.

She was pure, lucid evil – all for the sake of simply being so – embodied in a darling, doll-house body.

And Dabi hated her for it.

Those shrill giggles. The blossomy flush across her chubby cheeks. All porcelain relics that drove Dabi wild with rage. He'd been burned and forged. She'd been born and baptized, out from the womb in a bloody, messy madness. Steel from day-one with a taste for destruction rather than mother's milk.

Perhaps that was why she cooed when Dabi called her names. Maybe that was why she purred whenever he hit her hard across the face, the white skin of her jaw flaring up in an infectious redness, his handprint like a blue trophy along her cheek the next day. She wore the bruises of his abuse like pearl earrings; laughed at him because he was the lesser evil. She smiled – no, smirked – and would always scurry back for more, unscathed by the threat of the game because Dabi was secondary compared to the demons that pranced around her skull like tattered ballerinas inside a music box.

And though he hated her for it, he also drank it in. The smell of her: rust over strawberry-scented lotion. The heavy wetness of her tongue against his earlobe – Hiii Dabi-kun ~ want to play? – as well as its thirsty redness, as though she'd been sucking on cherry lollipops. She'd snake her hands, nails bitten down and broken, into his lap. Would watch the alcohol run down his throat, or the cigarette between his lips as it burned itself into hazy-grey oblivion. You like me. You want to be like me.

"You're cute when you're not being crazy," Dabi would say.

Already knowing the answer, she'd offer him a low crooning sound like a hungry kitten. Tilt her head. Lick her lips. "And when I am crazy? What am I then?"

"Fucking hot."

The first time, she'd licked the blood of her innocence off of him. Eager. Her hand lingering in a harsh, menacing grip along his cock. The day after, she'd grinned like a hungry predator, baring both her teeth and the swirling bruises down her neck like black jewels – and Dabi had pretended to know nothing about them. Shoving her away. Saying cruel things. Pretending, pretending, pretending that it didn't scorch his veins or set his insides trembling when she flounced and fluttered before him with all the childish nonchalance of a hyena. Blonde hair bouncing against her head in a lopsided mess. Giggles still fairy-light and thoroughly unfazed by him because he could never hurt her, no matter how badly he wanted to, and she knew it.

All the times after that, he fucked her to make her cry. His hands around her throat, his teeth chewing into her skin with all the intensity of a man sucking on bones. Harder still, Dabi would thrust into her with all the violent intention he could muster – like gouging out the seeds from a pomegranate, soaking in its extravagance and just as sweet – his own spine feeling like it might shatter under the strain.

Amongst the darkness of his bedroom (not hers; never hers – because the scent of her clothing in a girlish, stewing mess across the floor, and the teddy bears, and the pretty, bloody things she liked to keep – oh fuck, it all made him so weak). Against the dirty roughness of alleyway walls and bathroom stalls. On top of Kurogiri's bar counter – a personal favourite of Dabi's, because it gave him all the more reason to slap her through the face if she dared to make a sound.

He'd push himself into her mouth until she gagged. And then he would push deeper still, clenching her hair between his fingers as he forced her down against him. Keeping her on her knees no matter how the broken shards of glass dug into her skin, nor how her back ached under the pressure of his hands. He'd singe the insides of her thighs with his fingertips. Would relish the reverberating echo of her scream against his palm as he dug his staples into the naked flesh of her back. And while he came – into her, on her stomach, over her lips and face in a marking sowing of his pretend-power – he'd watch with a fleeting satisfaction as her eyes watered and while saliva spilled from her mouth in a breathy helplessness. She'd tremble. She'd dab at the violating mess between her legs.

She'd bleed.

But she'd never cry – instead, she'd laugh. Always with that bitter, lovely sound. Always sending an infuriated longing through Dabi's spine.

She'd laugh because no matter how bruised or bloody her body, Dabi's own was always an equal tragedy. A landscape of oozing scratches like five-lined valleys down his back, rich in their aching tenderness and pulling at his charred excuse for skin. Her teeth in mosaics of red in his neck. The flesh of his stomach: an inky watercolour of black and purple, her teeny fists having pounded against him with animal fierceness as she struggled to free her throat from his thrusts. She'd point out all the ways she had hurt him while he'd been trying, trying his hardest, to hurt her – And you know why Dabi-kun? It's because you know you're still only second best. You like me because I'm exactly what you want to be.

Dabi was hand-made, crafted from the shrapnel of his father's hatred and attempts to kill the boy he'd been. Disintegrating in a cloud of blue suffocation, wishing and damning and fucking the pain away to fit better into this stapled façade. He was a delicate passing of rebellion, an aftereffect, the ephemeral silhouette fading out from a deficient past-life. But she – she was born with the boiling red blood of a polar bear; born to be a girl with a hint of the devil, cold hands sinking deeper, deeper, deeper into Dabi's core. Sliding serpent, apple-sweet creature of Hell.

He ripped at her clothes, cried into her skin because she was like divine absolution. All the things he could never be. His bite marks were the lyrics to hymns, all his violence across the expanse of her body an act of worship for the unattainable monster she dangled before him. He could never help himself – would always sink to his knees and moan into the bloodied mess he'd tried to make of her. I love you, Toga. He'd been a little boy once. Fuck, fuck. I love you.

You know what your problem is, Dabi-kun? Venom from her lips, her tongue flecked with the crimson of Dabi's blood. She'd lean down, lick the sweat from his neck like a suckling vampire. Your problem is that you're still just dying, dying, dying to be loved, loved, loved.