"If you were a hero, you wouldn't have to kill him," Dabi told her before she could leave the apartment with her cello.

She looked back at him and raised an unimpressed eyebrow. "And let my family find me? No fucking way."

He snorted at her, "We had a meeting for figuring out a way to deal with our shit fathers and never found a way to do so. Becoming a hero is your best bet."

She whirled around, placing her cello down just in case, and walked up to him. "And how the fuck could I become one without alerting my family, Dabi?"

He was silent at that, though it was clear he was thinking about it. Saori picked up her cello and again tried to make her way out.

"Underground Heroes are a thing." He said, "They don't get any news coverage because stealth is important and people knowing them is typically pretty bad for them."

She snorted at him, but he didn't let her disagreement stop him. He hadn't let her lack of faith in the idea of making her an actual Hero stop him either. She knew she couldn't become a Hero already. Even if she could get away with being blind, she had no education. Heroes worked to save lives; they wouldn't let someone who looked like an idiot on paper be one.

"You could get sponsored by an already established hero. Our best bet would be the birdie since he knows your blind but knows you're not weak for it. Maybe you can use some pity and tug at his heartstrings a li-."

"I am not manipulating anyone." She growled. How the fuck could he think she'd do that?

"Okay then," he backed off quickly. "Then there's the only one other option. With who your family is-."

"You fucking know why I won't fucking do that." She momentarily checked herself to see if she had transformed without realising it. With how guttural her voice came out, it wouldn't have surprised her, but she hadn't.

"Then I guess there's no way where you won't have to kill your father." He stated, far too flippantly for her tastes. "Looks like neither of us can get rid of our fathers."

Maybe it was because he pushed a button. Maybe it was because winter always left her short on patience and she just couldn't fucking understand why he'd say that of all things. Saori didn't physically lash out, she'd long since learnt not to with her strength.

She spun and shot him her most unimpressed look. "It's your brother I want to save. Why don't you seem to care about him? You don't even seem to think of him as a person." She just couldn't understand it, not even when she grew up with scientists and sponsors looking at her as if she wasn't as sentient as them. "You want to ruin Endeavour; I can understand that. But you have never mentioned saving your siblings from an abusive fucktard. I can't understand that."

She just wanted answers. Calamity wanted to know how her own father, her own blood, could look at her like that.

Saori shuts down that train of thought hard.

Something in her tries to click into place but it's just off the mark for some reason. It grated on her; a strange pain that started as emotional before bleeding into physical discomfort. Thinking about her father and that specific encounter always flared that pain.

Saori needed an answer from Dabi. She needed him to tell her why.

There was silence between them. His heart and his breathing didn't change even as his teeth ground against each other. The sound of his burnt skin pulling was something she'd gotten used to. He tensed but relaxed with a single deep breath.

"I thought after you admitted what Xerxen had done to you, that you'd understand." He growled. The chair skidded across the ground as he stood up and walked over to her. "She fucked you up so bad you ran to a country where you had nothing. Being homeless was better than staying in luxury with her. She used you, she didn't care about you."

Saori barely stopped herself from stabbing Dabi. As it was, her tanto was pressed against his chest, though it was placed in a way that the damage wouldn't have been fatal. She could feel his heart beating through that connection. This didn't stop him from continuing to speak his mind.

"Fuyumi betrayed me. She always makes excuses for him. Natsuo is pathetic. He understood but never did anything, still hasn't done anything. Mother hates me. She doesn't love me, she never cared about me, she never stood up for me. And Shouto…" He cut off his rant to laugh. She hated this laugh. "Everything I went through, all the pain, blood, sweat, tears and scars were for nothing. When he came along, I was cast off. When Endeavour is down and out – he'll be stuck watching everything he worked for go up in smoke and be reduced to ashes."

It was silent in the apartment. Her heart thundered in her chest from the adrenaline in her veins. Dabi's heart remained calm, like his detached almost unhinged voice. She could stab him. Knock him out and dump him in another city. Away from her home. Something was screaming at her to do it. That he was a threat and she needed to stay away from him.

But she couldn't. It physically hurt to even think such thoughts.

She returned her tanto to its hidden sheath in her sleeve. She couldn't help Xerxen. But she could help Dabi. He's just tense from all the talks and having to trust someone he didn't know.

"Xerxen does care about me. She just can't show it healthily. She was a teen when I left, she'll grow better after some time apart." She whispered. "I don't know your family, but I do know you were a child, and your siblings are younger than you. Your mother failed you, yes, but your siblings were just as hurt and are still being hurt now. You can't blame them for being unable to help you or themselves when no one has ever shown them how to."

They were at an impasse. She wouldn't back down, but Dabi won't suddenly start caring. There wasn't anything she could say that would make him. He turned away, and she left the building, cello in hand and a tugging pain in her chest begging her to go back and make it right.

Saori's long since learned how to ignore such thoughts when it came to Xerxen and the rest of her family. She could ignore these ones for a bit.


Saori resisted the impulse to bite her tongue or the inside of her cheek after her own words came back to her in a new light. Dabi hasn't been able to get help either. Why should she have expected him to do something just because he was the eldest?

He wasn't like Fieyre. Not even her eldest brother managed to 'save' himself, let alone everyone else. They had Mum for that. Although even she had needed Stepdad and the others to help her first too.

It can be close to impossible to save yourself. You always need help or support as well as something like an example or a role model.

"I'm a fucking idiot." She hissed to herself.

"-don't think this is a good idea." Someone said. She was about to ignore them like she did everyone else, but the response made her change direction from home to that person and their companions.

"There aren't any gangs in this area. Hawks won't deal with low fries like us, and the vigilante only comes at night." The prospective criminal announced. "Even then, we've got a man on the inside. The police won't convict us. He'll just bruise us up and we'll be out of there in no time."

She kicked the wall down. Excessive maybe, but she wasn't in the best of moods.

"The cello player?!" One person screamed. Well shit, she's going to have to hit that one extra hard on the head. Although maybe she shouldn't have carried her cello in with her. That was just giving it away.

They're all dumped at the police station with empty pockets. They're all out free the next day.

Endo apologised but well, she was only a vigilante. If she could have become a hero, she would be one already. Then they would've been fast-tracked to prison. At least they didn't remember the cello.

That fact did not improve her mood.


"I didn't know you played the cello, Kaida." Hawks announced, clapping along with her audience.

Said audience gasped and cheered at his appearance, breaking into whispers about their apparent friendship. One of them was actually right about their relationship. Some of them were so wildly off the mark it was at least hilarious.

She ignored them. "My older sibling started teaching me, then my Mum finished the job. Everyone in my family knew how to play at least one instrument." She said while thinking of another song. Roundtable Rival was very jaunty and energetic, even when translated to the cello. It'd also give her vocal cords a break, not that they need it yet, but something like that…

"Oooh, am I finally getting some backstory? What level of friendship does that make us?" Her apparent friend asked. She frowned and tilted her head in confusion.

"I… don't know?" She hadn't known there were levels of friendship. "But you're my third highest I guess." Dabi and Endo certainly knew more about her past than he did.

Hawks paused at that for a split second but there was an audience. He had an image to maintain. Even if from what she's been overhearing from him and some others, he's actually a bit of a dork. A driven and hardworking dork, but a dork nonetheless.

She's long since learned to ignore people when they talk about attractiveness. It's hard to make such a thing matter to a person when they're blind and unable to so much as touch anyone without hurting them.

"Well, how many instruments do you know how to play?" He asked, some feathers going off to give some minor help to people. She really should ask how high a level Hawks is. The only rankings she knows were All Might and Endeavour. It may just be because he's the local Hero, but Hawks is always spoken of very highly.

"Three," Saori replied to the question. "Cello, Violin, and Voice. Don't exactly have a violin anymore though."

She ripped a chord from the cello. Everyone silences and Hawks shut his mouth. She sent him a feral grin then opened her own. "Glory," another few rips, "Glory" then she began the first verse.

"This is not another story.
This is not another drill.
I refuse to be another number, now,
Never staying down,
This is something real."

She couldn't see their faces, she couldn't feel their emotions, but their hearts started pounding and they all moved with the rhythm she set. Whether it was consciously or unconsciously didn't matter. Music could be just as great a stress relief as beating thugs up again.

The song had to end eventually and when it did, a commotion started up inside the mall. A villain attack, not an encore, unfortunately. Although they did have the decency to wait until she finished her song at least. Hawks dealt with it swiftly though. All she had to do was make someone trip to prevent them from walking under some falling debris.

It was noticed though. Hawks looked over at her. She was the only person in this place to not either run or clamour for a better view. She grinned and started walking away. What she did was technically illegal, though since it worked to save someone, it would hopefully be overlooked. She had a distraction in place though.

"Happy Birthday, Hawks!" She called over the cheers.

It grew into a cacophony as the public realised what was said and continued it.

Even with the good publicity that came with unveiling his birthday and the realisation that he was selfless enough to still work on that day to save people, she took the wing smack over the head for it. Although the fact that hers and Dabi's haunt was overtaken for his birthday dinner, consisting solely of chicken, was not as expected.

Although at least he was the one crashing the place and providing food. Didn't he have friends to celebrate it with?

"Why did you save him?" Hawks asked out of the blue.

Saori blinked, tilting her head in confusion. Who was he talking about?

"In the mall, I saw the ground move of its own free will. That was you, you made it obvious." He bit into a chicken nugget. It was gone in seconds. "So, why did you save him?"

Dabi was staring at her, barely restraining a glare. She hadn't told him about what happened in the mall or that she used a part of her quirk in front of a Hero. It's not something that had ever come up yet.

"Half the reason is that I hate being near corpses." She confessed; she really did not want to be forced to eat a person again. "Please don't ask why, Dabi only knows because it was involved with our first meeting."

She'd been clean for three years now and she wouldn't risk it again. There have only been three cases in the last eight years since she got out of that hole in the ground. Each time proved that she wasn't able to restrain herself if she could smell a corpse and not hear a heartbeat from it.

"The second reason is that I could and therefore should. As a sibling of mine once told me, "All it takes for evil to win, is for good to do nothing" or something like that." She didn't hide the remorse in her voice. Saori never really gets to use that quote, it never failed to set Fieyre off and then Phocidae usually reacted to that. "Besides, I'm blind. No one ever believes I could do it."

Yes, she did just admit that she has done it before. However, was Hawks going to call her out on it?

"What I don't get is how, and it's got nothing to do with your blindness." He added on before she could make a blind joke. "I almost missed him and the debris, yet you saved him before I could. You're definitely capable. No, what I don't get is how your quirk is listed as Land Shark and as a Transformative quirk."

"Probably because I've been repressing that part of my quirk until recently. Inherited it from my shitstain of a father, I wasn't exactly willing to test out all of his abilities." She crunches a bone between her teeth and hummed in delight as she finds out that not all the marrow had been boiled out of this one. "I like marrow. I wish there were more bony food on the market. These teeth are good for that at least."

"Most people can't shatter bones with their jaws, Kaida," Dabi said, pouring himself another cup of soda. They really need to eat better, but her biology makes it hard to put on weight that's not muscle—one benefit of being specifically bred and genetically altered.

Hawks dropped his line of enquiry after that change of topic.


Dabi's leaving and everything inside of her was screaming to go with him, to not let him go. But he said he'll be back and to wait for him here. She wasn't allowed to get caught or get forced to run.

Saori needed to somehow keep this building, the sellers had noticed that the infestation had disappeared and now buyers were willing to actually look at the place. She didn't have much time.

She breathed deeply, trying to ignore and push past the pulsing ache in her chest that spiked and turned erratic after she lost track of Dabi. It wasn't working and tears burned in her eyes. She sang a chorus. The tone was sad, but the positive lyrics managed to help more than breathing did. She wondered if that was why Tsarina always sung it when she was particularly sad.

It still felt as though she was lying to herself though.

"You've got it all
You lost your mind in the sound
There's so much more, you can reclaim your crown
You're in control
Rid of the monsters inside your head
Put all your faults to bed
You will see King again."


Song of the Chapter: King Lauren - Aquilina. Slight changes were made to make it fit in the story better (aka "be king" to "see King")

Also Glory - The Score in the middle and Roundtable Rival is mentioned, it's by Lindsey Stirling.

I don't own the songs, BNHA or Pokemon.

Although, last night in my Pokemon Reborn game, I just caught almost every Pokemon (finishing my last non-legend/mythical/ultra beast catch with Deino-Zweilous-Hydreigon and making sure she was shiny to boot!). I'm just missing a few legendaries and Ultra Beasts but my last Pokemon is eventually going to be Arceus due to the story. This game has every Pokemon from Gen 1 to Gen 7 Ultra Sun/Moon. Xerxen was very useful against the team of Solgaleo, Lunala, and one of every form of Necrozma (Normal, Dusk, Dawn, and Ultra) you need to face before getting the chance to catch Necrozma. So many Psychic types.

It's been keeping me occupied while I've been unable to get and play Violet. It's going to be a Christmas gift so I have to wait until then :(