iii. skin

shigaraki-san's expecting you .. dress nice! S

Finally.

Already, some days had passed since that initial meeting in the bar. Since then, Dabi's mind had been occupied with thoughts of Stain and Shigaraki and, to some distraction, Satoshi. S for Satoshi? Was that his real name?

The only names listed in the burner phone's contacts were Contact 1, Contact 2, Contact 3. No photo ID. Dabi suspected that these may well have been temporary numbers too. The anonymity of it all had further fuelled his eagerness and agitation – nights spent up late at 24-hour food joints and cheap motels, checking and re-checking the phone to find no notifications, no new updates. How long would they keep him waiting? Perhaps he should have accepted that offer of a drink, should have lingered a little longer over that cigarette.

You just interest me, is all.

Dabi didn't like the way Satoshi looked at him. How could he explain it? He was used to people being afraid of him, even enjoyed it (the crunch of bone beneath his fist, the quiver of bloodied lips; the way people flinched away from the flames at his fingertips). As much as they were afraid of him, so too were they disgusted. Even mutant-types turned their noses up at his scars. And there was power in that. The world hated him. He hated the world, and he liked it – stormy, unquenchable hate to fill his stomach at night and to keep him satisfied where other things could not. Satoshi, however, didn't look at him like that. You seem a little overcooked to be commenting on appearances, he'd said. Like it was a he'd even seen worse.

In the mirror of a public restroom, Dabi considered himself – who could have seen worse than this? Body charred, his father's beliefs written across his back in the rawest, most scorching form of education. Dead eyes. Chipped nails, split knuckles, stapled palms. He was skin and bone, the chasms behind his collarbones dipped deep in shadow beneath the fluorescent light. He licked his teeth, furrowed his brow. Worse than this?

The meeting was to be held that evening. Dabi caught a train to Kamino and watched his reflection in the windows.

The bar was ill-frequented and small, its entrance in an unexpected side-street well concealed by neighbouring buildings. He was only due after dark, but had arrived with the sun still solidly on the horizon. He lingered for some time in a convenience store, snagging a pack of cigarettes and a soda. He scoped the block for easy escapes and somewhere to get dinner. People met his eye and immediately looked away, making wider and wider circles around him the more the sky melted from blue to orange to mothy, pale purple, until at last the street lights came on and Dabi spotted the broker, Giran, rounding the corner towards the bar.

A girl was with him.

Satoshi was not.

"Dabi! My friend," Giran called, opening his arms in greeting. "Just on time. You haven't been waiting for us, have you?"

Dabi looked to the girl, who was wearing a school uniform and couldn't have been older than fifteen, and to his surprise, he recognised her from the news. What had her name been again? She stared back at him with a dewy, animal look on her face – sharp-toothed grin, chubby cheeks feverishly flushed. Her eyes travelled the length of his body and revealed equal parts interest and revulsion, cat-like features contorting as her smile widened and her gaze darkened.

"Aaahh~" she cooed, "I didn't know there'd be other people here too ~ who are you?" And then, more pointedly, she tipped her head along her shoulders. "You don't look like the kind of guy I'd like."

"Toga-chan, this is Dabi," Giran said. "Dabi, Toga-cha–"

"I know who she is," Dabi interrupted. On the news, it was said that she was wanted for murder. "Why would you bring someone like her to meet Shigaraki Tomura?"

"Same as you, isn't it? Giran-san says Shigaraki Tomura is a friend of Mister Stain's!"

Smilingly, Giran gave Dabi a long, soliciting look. "Come now, Dabi," he said, reasonably. "If you're going to go through with this, you'll have to give people the benefit of the doubt, you know? But let's not delay and keep Shigaraki-san waiting – shall we head on in?"

People ask him if it still hurts. He can never look them in the eye when he tells them no.

He pulls down his sleeves as far as they will go. He tugs at his scarf and buries his chin towards his chest. He says it doesn't hurt any more – but it does. It follows him as a phantom on his back. A faceless, shapeless heat that leaves him cold. In the mirror, he sees himself and wants to rip the flesh from his bones. When he sits in the bath, water lukewarm and drizzled with tissue oil, he wants to scrub himself raw. And when his father cannot bear to look at him, when his father holds him and trembles and sobs wetly into his neck – my beautiful boy, I'm sorry, why? why? my beautiful, beautiful boy – he knows that he is damaged and disturbing and not a beautiful boy.

People ask him if it still hurts, and he doesn't have the words to explain to them that the pain he feels isn't the sort of pain they're talking about.

He dreams that he is disintegrating, pieces of himself drifting away like ash. Holes open up across his body – he can reach his hand into his throat, into his chest, and prod his organs. Sticky. Wet. Cold and quiet, as though he is dead. And when he wakes, it is with a violent gasp, a lingering feeling that he has been emptied out. Blood on his hands. Bile in his throat. Memory etched across his spine and ribcage. He is nine years old, and he is disgusted by his body, by all that it stands for.

'Show me where it hurts,' the therapist tells him.

He shakes his head. He shows them nothing, because it hurts in places that only he knows about. Places that don't exist in other people. Boys his age don't have the same sort of spaces in their bodies as he does – hollows behind their hearts and under their stomachs, crevices filled with ugly feelings. Boys his age have unbroken skin and exciting quirks and mothers to love them. Boys his age have everything he doesn't – and he hates them for it. He hates himself for hating them. He just hates himself. And he doesn't know how to tell people that, because hate is a big feeling and he is only a child.

'Show me where it hurts,' the therapist tells him again.

Everywhere. Nowhere. He doesn't want it to hurt anymore.

The night ended ambiguously, and Dabi was left in exactly the same place he'd been days ago – one small step closer, but standing on unsteady ground. Thus far, Shigaraki Tomura and his so-called League of Villains were not what he'd been led to believe: children and lunatics with no finer appreciation for the cause at hand. I thought he was going to kill us, Toga Himiko had said. Dabi had thought he was going to kill them. Or, at least, that he was going to fucking well try.

He left the meeting that night with no promises having been made. That he'd hear from them soon was all he knew. Frustrated, irritable – but mostly, alone. Would any of this bring him any closer to what he was looking for? He hated not being able to get there on his own, not being able to gain the necessary ground by simply burning up problems as they presented themselves. It made him sick that he needed the resources and the alliances that Shigaraki Tomura – apparently – could provide, even if it was only a temporary evil. Intrusive thoughts began to rear themselves – weak, weak, weak, always so weak; that familiar voice, that familiar shame – and Dabi had to strain every morsel of his willpower to shut them out. Hands fisted in his pockets, head swimming, he wandered the empty streets until he found a place to eat.

He sat by the window, chewing listlessly through a bowl of curry udon. When his bowl was empty, he took out a cigarette. The staff behind the counter eyed him but made no move to tell him to stop, and for a long while, he stared out the window with smoke in his throat and a lot on his mind. His reflection was blurred and yellow against the darkness outside. He blew smoke at the glass and watched with some approval as his features took on an indistinct, misty quality. Like he was disappearing, just a ghost – unreal, untouchable. No one would be able to catch him like this. Maybe it would be better to simply disappear after all rather than having to go through all of this effort for nothing.

When the cigarette was close to consumed, the burner phone began to ring.

Contact 2. Something stirred in Dabi. So soon?

He stubbed the cigarette out beneath his boot and answered cautiously.

'I've been told the meeting was a success.' It was Satoshi. 'Guess that means we'll be seeing each other again real soon.'

"Interesting if you'd call that a success," Dabi said. Surprising himself, he leaned back in his seat, in a mood to humour and almost glad for the distraction. "You supposed to be keeping an eye on me?"

There was a smile in Satoshi's voice. 'Of course. It's in the job description.'

"Pretty late to be working."

'Villainy never sleeps.'

Dabi dropped his head back on his shoulders. He remembered that smile, that shivering energy, how much it had irked and unsettled him. "So," he said, "what do you want?"

'Lots of things. But I could probably do with a bowl of curry.'

He didn't want to make it obvious. Slowly, Dabi glanced about the restaurant and returned his view to the street. Prisms of light from the street lamps. Still, silent shadows. Slowly, easily, a lonely figure stepped out into the light and waved winsomely at Dabi. "Have you been watching me all night?" he asked.

'No,' Satoshi said, and lowered his hand into his pocket. 'I had other things to attend to.' Unmovingly, the two of them stared at each other from opposite sides of the street. He was willowy and strangely shapeless, like a dark figure caught moving at the back of a photograph. 'I'm free now though,' he said eventually, gaze fixed and beckoning from the street lamp's twilit light. 'Want some company?'

"Not particularly," Dabi lied.

'Okay. I'm on my way.'

The call ended. Satoshi crossed the street without looking both way and didn't meet Dabi's eye when he entered the restaurant. He made for the counter, pointing at the menu and taking quite some time to order. He rocked back and forth on his toes, bit his fingers while deciding. And when at last he came to sit, sauntering over with all the easiness of meeting an old friend (a façade that concealed his careful, watchful air well but not entirely, not from someone that regarded him with the exact same sort of suspicion), he pulled his chair up close enough for their knees to almost touch beneath the table. He was smaller than Dabi remembered.

"So what did you think of Shigaraki-san?" Satoshi asked, leaning his head onto his hand. "He's a piece of work, right?"

"Tell me about it."

"Think you could work with him?"

"We'll see."

Satoshi's smile waned slightly. His voice took on a soft, piercing lilt that Dabi liked even less than the restless chirp he was familiar with. "I figured Shigaraki-san wouldn't be exactly what you were hoping for," Satoshi said. "You're not quite what he was wanting either."

Dabi replied sharply, though with little more emotion than before, "What do you know of what I'd hope for?"

"I like to think I've made some good guesses. Though I admit, you're a little harder to pin down than the others." Satoshi paused as the food arrived. He had ordered for both of them, two vegetarian curries and coffees. The coffee, way too strong and way too sweet and with milk, was not how Dabi liked it. "Sorry," Satoshi said without sounding sorry. "I'm not as good at guessing how people take their orders." Then he continued, "You'll be useful to each other. You and Shigaraki, I mean. Even if Shigaraki-san isn't the Stain ideologist you were looking for, he has the same idea in mind about hero society, and that's all we were really hoping. Mutual interests are what make alliances, even if the details are a little messy."

Staring at him, Dabi said nothing for a moment. Even though this was a matter of business, Satoshi spoke in a way that was personal and highly singular. It struck a nerve. "What about you?" he asked eventually, unsure why he cared to know.

"Hmm?"

"What do you want in all of this?"

With a look of surprise, Satoshi blinked at him. He smiled, shrugged flatly. "I'm just helping out the middleman."

"Gotta be more to it than that." Dabi leaned in. "So what is it? Running away from the past or some shit? It seems weird to me that a kid like you would be helping someone like Giran."

"What do you mean a kid like me?"

"I don't know. Guess you just seem too soft to be much on the side of villainy."

Satoshi took a long sip from his coffee, not breaking eye contact. The smile faded completely, which in itself gave Dabi a certain feeling of satisfaction, as Satoshi appeared to chew carefully on his words. Eventually, he spoke, voice measured and thoughtful. "I owe Giran an awful lot," he said. "That's all there is to it, really. And I don't give much of a shit about society at large, so I take pleasure in doing what I do. That answer your question?"

"Seems a bit wishy-washy to me."

"Not all of us are fanatics. Some just want to get by."

"I guess so."

"That disappoint you?"

"I didn't have very high expectations to start with."

"Oh!" Satoshi cried, and threw a white, bony hand to his chest. He was smiling again. "You wound me, Dabi."

They ate in relative silence, which did not prove to be entirely uncomfortable. Dabi was pleasantly surprised by the vegetarian curry, of which he had initially been dubious. All the while, he stole glances of Satoshi out the corner of his eye, uncertain about how he felt to find that, occasionally, Satoshi was looking at him too. A mischievous, childish face incompatible with the darkness of his expression, the knowing in his eyes. What made him look at Dabi like that?

They shared a cigarette afterwards, handing it between themselves in between more talk of the same - back and forth, not really going anywhere, and yet still providing Dabi with some twisted comfort after the night he'd had. By the time they were done, it was reaching into the early hours of the morning. Dabi had fully intended on walking out of the restaurant without paying, and so was taken aback to find that Satoshi footed the bill. "Glad I got that drink after all," he said of it, tongue-in-cheek, and almost seemed to wink.

And with that, they went in opposite directions. Dabi walked fast, keeping his head firmly forward, doing his best to remind himself that to look back for any reason would be a mistake, even though he couldn't quite say why.