Chapter One

All Eyes

The cat had been watching him for three nights. The first night, it had appeared after he charred two villains he deemed too low to join the league. The cat, with it's midnight fur, wound around his legs affectionately even as the stench and heat of charred human flesh rolled through the alley. He'd never seen the cat in his life and had stepped away. The creature didn't need to die right then; it was probably just lonely. But after it had followed behind Dabi for four blocks, Dabi had turned to see it sitting in the middle of the alley and watching him with liquid amber eyes that were far too human to be comfortable.

He'd burned the cat.

The next night was the same. This time, the cat appeared in his peripheral as it entered the alley and sat behind him as he questioned the candidate he'd found that night. He ignored the cat as he finished the conversation, only to light the idiot he was talking to on fire, and then turned to the cat. It watched him with those same human-amber eyes. Its tail flicked against the pavement. Finally, it meowed.

"What do you want? Hm? Why do you keep following me?" He knew he wasn't talking to the cat, though it would look that way to anyone who might have been watching. It was someone's quirk, he'd guessed.

The cat meowed again, then licked it's paw twice and groomed it's head. Eventually it looked back up at Dabi, just in time to see a wall of blue flame consume it. This time, Dabi stayed long enough to see that once his fire dissipated, the cat was completely gone. Not even ash remained.

It was definitely a quirk.

The third night, Dabi was halfway across the city from where he'd first encountered the cat. He'd been exploring the streets during the night when there was little Pro Hero activity. It was a time of day that few people were out and about except the people he was specifically interested in: those that lurked in the shadows.

He was so far away from where he had originally seen the cat that at first he didn't realize what he was seeing when the cat hopped up on a garbage can ahead of him. Intelligent eyes were already trained on him, and he raised his hand to light the cat, the same as he'd done the previous two nights, but the folded piece of paper in it's mouth caught Dabi's eye.

Slowing, he came to a halt in front of the cat, and took the piece of paper from it's mouth. The cat let him have it easily, then jumped down off the trashcan and trotted away.

It seems we're looking for the same thing. Meet me in the alley
between Nobu and Kikko tomorrow at 1:00 am.
I would like to meet you.

The note wasn't signed, but it caught his attention. Neat handwriting; precise. Someone who took their time in crafting the note. The paper wasn't torn out of a notebook, or crumpled in any way. It was folded in the middle, but there were no mismatched edges. Everything about the note was intentional.

It was just as he'd thought: the cat had been following him. And with the note as confirmation, it had been listening to him, too. There was a chance the cat belonged to a Pro and that it was a trap, but it was a slim chance. If it was a Pro, they would have made the jump on him while he was busy roasting it one of the previous nights. No, it was someone else. Someone interested in the league.

The first sentence had caught his attention. If nothing else, it would be a good idea to oblige the request for a meeting to see who was on the other side. Whoever it was, they were smart enough to watch him before making a move rather than barreling into a meeting blind.

Dabi didn't like to be caught off-guard, especially before a meeting with a potential candidate. The fact that the interested party had been the one to contact him rather than vice versa said that they knew the alley that they were asking him to rendezvous at. If it had been him seeking out the meeting, he would have had them meet him at one of the handful of locations he was familiar with. Which meant that he was moving into the note writer's territory.

He had survived for so long on the streets by being smart. Having a powerful quirk was only one half of the equation, because if he wasn't smart about surviving, he'd be dead already.

He made sure to arrive early. He'd scoped it out from afar during the day, but nothing seemed particularly out of place. The alley that the note said to meet at was located on an abandoned street that was two blocks over from the main traffic. Nobu and Kikko, two old restaurants that crowded either side of the alley were both abandoned and boarded. The alley was secluded, and the only people who passed by were a young woman who walked a dog and kept her head low, not lingering in the street, and a couple of low-lifes who passed through pretty quick. All-in-all, it wasn't too bad a spot to meet someone at. The Pros stayed on the main streets and didn't come anywhere near the rendezvous spot. If he'd been scoping for a new meeting spot, this would have been on his radar.

Dabi didn't watch it for too long. An hour or two, and then he moved on, returning only once it got close to 1:00 in the morning.

Like in the daytime, the street was deserted. The streetlights were spaced far apart, and most didn't work, or flickered at best. Little light reached the alley, cloaking it in darkness.

Nothing out of the ordinary stood out to him. It was a quiet night, overall. A siren bled through the night softly, miles away. If anything had stood out to him or if he'd gotten any sense that something was off, he would have left. However, it was just a normal night in a normal alley in an abandoned part of town. Hands shoved into his pockets, he leaned against the wall of one of the shops near the mouth of the alley. It was the perfect position to see any approaching traffic, but he could also see the rest of the alley to the right of him. It was there, in the darkness of the alley, that a shadow moved.

Pushing off from the wall, hands came out of his pockets just in case as he took a couple of steps toward the person approaching. "It's rare that I get contacted," Dabi began. He stayed alert, never dropping his guard as the other person continued to approach. "Usually I'm the one doing the contacting - oh not you."

He recognized her immediately with her mask pulled up over her nose and teal hair wild around her head. Even though summer was waning, autumn had not yet made an appearance. Even so, she still wore pants and a jacket. Sharp aquamarine eyes pierced the night, watching him. Her own hands were in her pockets, in what would have been a casual stance if it was anyone else, but she radiated tension, and her gaze snapped of irritation.

His intrigue over being contacted by someone interested in joining the league immediately evaporated, leaving him more than a little annoyed. "Didn't you get it the first time I told you?" He asked, knowing why she stood in front of him. "I said I'd contact you once it was time to meet the boss."

"It's been three weeks."

"And it'll likely be longer," he said. They'd met previously, and he'd told her then that he would contact her when it was time to meet the boss. "What's the hurry? Why are you so eager?"

She cocked her head to the side, watching him watch her. "It sounds like you don't trust me."

"If you're smart you don't trust anybody." He replied coolly. And no, he didn't trust her, much like he didn't trust nearly anyone. Just like tonight, she'd found him previously before, too, giving him as little information about himself as he had initially given Shigaraki just months prior. Karma was a bitch. Yuki with the ice quirk, as she'd made herself known. She had been cautious to give him too many details about herself, and after talking to her for a bit, he had come to the understanding that she wasn't completely useless. Not like the other trash he'd found up to that point, at least. Even if she had refused to show her quirk. "I told you before you need to wait."

Her reply was quick, "I'm not a patient person."

"That sucks," he bantered right back, "because you need to be patient. When it's time, I'll contact you. And besides, you haven't been entirely truthful. Who's the cat?" He meant to say, "who's the person with the cat quirk?" but the meaning got across just fine.

She shrugged, but didn't pause to reply to his question. "But you're still going around trying to recruit new members, but not giving anyone who is good material the opportunity to officially join."

"No one's been worth it."

"But I assume I am, since I'm still alive?" Her eyes, though still glinting in what light there was, were amused. A challenge was there, her smirk translated only in the creases of mirth around her eyes and the tone of her voice. She had set it up, and he'd walked right into it.

Yuki was annoying, and she was wasting his time. He could be seeking out other recruits, but instead, she had tracked him down just to ask why he hadn't introduced him to the leader yet. "You're pushing it," he finally said.

"Oh am I?" There it was again, the teasing lilt to her words. It grated against him, annoyance rising. "What, because I dare to challenge your judgment?"

He reacted before he could otherwise decide, throwing flames at her. A good candidate or not, she was annoying as fuck, and couldn't even follow simple orders. Yuki aptly dodged, and before she could attack back, he shot more flames at her.

She didn't need to dodge, though. It took a beat for Dabi to realize that his flames had been re-directed upwards. Heat filled the alleyway, searing at his exposed skin like the sun on a hot day. He could feel the promise of his skin burning later if he kept using his quirk.

His flames ceased as he paused, curiosity winning, and he saw the wall of ice she had erected before a tendril of ice shot directly at him.

The ice should have melted; there was little that could endure his flames.

Dabi side-stepped out of the way of the ice tendril and launched another attack at the woman's undefended side, but she was already sprinting around the other side of her ice wall and heading straight for him. He wasted no time in redirecting his wall of flames, but she didn't even pause in her approach. Rather, she raised her hands, and like a swimmer cutting through water, cut through his flames until she was nearly on top of him. Even though he had attacked her with his flames that burned hotter than those of Endeavor's, ice crystals still covered her body, and he felt a freezing breeze blow past him as he dodged the punch that she aimed at his head.

He pulled back his arm to swing another wall of flames at her, this close having a perfect shot, but she stepped toward him, drawing herself closer. Yuki's aquamarine gaze caught his, and she said just loud enough for him to hear, "I'm waiting."

As she continued past him, she brushed her fingers against his hand that wasn't aimed to launch another attack, as if to prove she could touch him; a promise of an attack she didn't complete. She didn't try to land another attack on him, and she didn't look over her shoulder to see if he was going to try to attack her while her back was turned. She trusted him - or was stupid enough - to assume he wasn't going to attack as she walked away and out of the mouth of the alley, leaving him alone with blue flames still burning in places where they had lit trash and debris aflame.

In the span of time it took for him to realize that she had made her exit, it occurred to him that this entire meeting had gone according to her plan - from the alleyway that was so far away from the main streets, she knew that they were going to be using their quirks, and she had counted on it; to the time of the night when not a single soul was out; to how she approached him, calm, collected, and putting on airs, just to use her quirk and show that she could not only hold her own against him, but get close to him - and he crossed the short distance from where she had left him to the mouth of the alley, looking down the street to find her.

It wasn't like he was going to tell her to wait, or that he'd go ahead and introduce her to their leader, because Shigaraki had said that he was to lay low for awhile longer as the news of Kamino cycled out of the media.

In truth, Dabi didn't know why he went to the mouth of the alley to spot the woman, but she was already gone, anyway.

She might could hold her own against him and his flames, but she was annoying as hell. If she thought that that little stunt was going to push him to introduce her to Shigaraki, she had another thing coming. She, and whoever the hell had the cat quirk.

NOTES:

Please review and leave some love if you enjoyed it! I'm quite excited about this little fic, and I hope you all love it as much as I do. Fun fact: I got the idea for this chapter while doing dishes. I originally thought it was going to be a one-shot, but I like Yuki and Dabi interacting too much to leave it as a one-shot.

I do not own, in any way, the characters, places, or ideas of the My Hero Academia universe created by Kohei Horikoshi. I only own my own characters and plot. No money is made off of this story.