AN: I got super-duper sick this weekend and was worried it was gonna make me late for my self-imposed deadline... but it had the opposite effect! Instead, I was more inspired than ever, though honestly I think that's just because of what I was writing. I really love horror/romance, and the horror is really getting a chance to shine right now since Dabi is in a MOOD and that mood is UNHINGED.
Anyway, my beta-reader/best friend told me this chapter was very unnerving, which is what I was going for! Which is to say, please take that as a warning. 😭 Prolly gonna be a lot of horror sprinkled throughout all the coming fluff and drama... Dabi and Suzu's relationship is meant to be pretty horrific, so womp womp! Horror and romance! Fluff and scary stuff! I live for that problematic shit.
009: a gift only your brother can give you.
"Mutilated to the point of perfection,
I'm the Patron Saint of Merciless Love."
Late November; 9 years.
Suzume doesn't know how many months it's been since her father shut her away in this tiny, third floor room.
Before, when she'd lived in the big house with Mama, this room had been what Mama called a "guest room". Suzume had always found that a little strange. The big house never had guests, nevermind the little third floor room.
At least the big house had Mama and Suzume. Much more rarely, it had her father, too. The big house, it breathed. It lived. There was movement in it, life in it. Laughter. Tears. Suzume's mother's voice, calling sweet down the hall.
The "guest" room never had anyone.
So, the room remained empty.
There were things in the room, of course. It wasn't empty like that. Tucked into the corner, there was the bed; always neat, always made. There was the big dresser, too, just across from the bed. Once, feeling bold, Suzume had crept into the room to peek inside those big drawers, curious at what she might find.
Like the room, the dresser had been empty, each and every drawer vacant of the sorts of things that should fill drawers — emptied out of everything except a fine layer of dust. She imagined the open drawers as hungry, gaping mouths. In that white and gray room, they ached for a spill of fabric and color. Yearned for life.
Starved for guests.
Realizing she was small enough to fit inside the biggest and bottom-most drawer, Suzume had fled on pounding feet down two flights of stairs into her mother's surprised arms, her heart a terrible thrum in all of her limbs.
Mama had told her that when Dad had built the big house that he'd had the room built for his mother – Suzume's grandmother, Mama had said. But Grandmother had died shortly after the house was built, gone in her sleep in some far away hospital. She'd never had the chance to step foot inside the big house, let alone the small, third floor room meant for her.
So, the room was no longer Grandmother's room. It had really never truly been Grandmother's room, and now, it was a "guest" room, empty of the only thing that mattered to a room: empty of people, and of purpose. Empty in the truest, most awful, most raw sense of the word.
And Suzume was terrified of it.
From the landing of the stairs, Suzume would sometimes stare down the corridor where she was just able to make out the dresser, peeking out from behind the half-shut door. No one had ever gone in to shut the drawers she'd left open. Bared like teeth, they hung wide, waiting. Waiting to be filled. Waiting to be closed. Waiting for a curious girl to stumble in, and fill the insides of that hungry, too-white dresser with something soft and warm and red.
Waiting to be sated.
A room for guests that never were. A dead woman's room.
A ghost room.
When Suzume's father had brought her back to the big house, he hadn't taken her back to her old room, on the second floor. "It's empty," he'd told her, tugging her by her hand past the second floor landing –
And onto the third floor staircase.
"Please," Suzume had whispered. "Can't I stay in my room?"
"Your mother took your things when she left, remember?" Her father's voice had been so cold. "There's no bed there anymore. Your room is empty."
Empty, empty, he reiterated again. But even with nothing in it, her old room couldn't be empty the way the ghost room was empty. Suzume had begged to be allowed to stay there anyway. She didn't mind sleeping on the floor, she told her father. She wouldn't complain, she promised.
"Too many windows," he'd told her, as if that made any sense. "The guest room will have to do."
The guest room. The guest room, with its one too-high up window. The guest room with its emptiness, it's never-meant-for-anyone hunger.
Her father intended for her to be its first guest.
Its second ghost.
Suzume – having been good and well-behaved as her father had requested up until that moment – screamed the whole way up the third floor staircase.
She screamed the full length of the corridor, too.
By the time her father had managed to wrestle her into the room, he was furious. He looked at her with blazing eyes, and her arms blossomed blue and purple under the vice grip of his hands. Brat, he'd called her – ungrateful bitch.
Words that had once been reserved for her mother.
Now that her mother was gone – filed away like Grandmother in some sterile, foreign hospital, asleep, asleep, dreaming and lost in the never-wake-up-way of sick, sullen sleepers – those words were Suzume's words. Those words were now her burden to bear.
And so, too, was the room. Guest room. Ghost room. Her room.
The torch thusly passed, her father had left her alone that night, screaming and beside herself in terror – left her alone in that empty, hungry third floor room.
Left her there, for good.
Day in, and day out, and she was never allowed to leave. Her father came instead, bearing food that Suzume picked at, listlessly.
Week in, and week out, he took her dirty clothes, and later returned them. The smell of the detergent made her queasy – it smelled like him. It smelled like him, in her doorway, but all the time. All the time.
Month in, and month out, there were replacement soaps for the attached bathroom and its tiny shower stall. Suzume hated to be dirty, but the shower was torture; the water was hot, but never hot enough. There was no reprieve from the cold set so deep in her bones – the cold that was the absence of her brother's heat, gone and lost.
And then, almost nightly, there was her father again, in the doorway to her room. Blood on his face, and in his hair, she could see it shiny and wet across his hands, seeping into his clothes. Her father, the hero. Hero, hero. A dirty word. "Heal me," he'd tell her. It was never a request. "Behave. You want to see your mother again, don't you?"
It hurt to heal her father. It hurt because healing anything hurt. It always did; that was the trade-off, wasn't it?
But more than that, touching her father, her bare palms pressed to his naked skin… it made her sick. It made her sick, sick, sick. Her touch – that awful pain – no, that pain had once been an intimacy she had shared with her brother and her brother alone. And it had been special, and it had been beautiful, and she had loved it, loved bearing that pain for him, because she loved her brother –
Loved him, loved him, loved him so much –
And oh, the room was hungry. Whether she was awake or asleep – whether she lay thoughtless like a cast-away doll on the floor, or weeping for her mother or brother in bed – it didn't matter. The room was hungry. The room consumed her.
Suzume felt like she was being slowly, irrevocably devoured. The room hollowed her out. The room was digesting her. The room wanted her love and it wanted her sorrow, and it ate her up, ate her up, and there were too many cracks in her, now, more and more every day, and that emptiness –
That emptiness was seeping in, instead.
Her brother's hand stirs in her hair, cupping the back of her head.
She's in the room, still, she realizes, her vision focusing again. Ahead of her, the door to her room is open, and the corridor looms beyond. Lighting, and thunder. Lightning, and thunder. But things are different. Suddenly, everything – her father, that ravenous hunger, and that awful, needling emptiness – everything feels so far away.
Her brother in the doorway is tall. Even crouched down to hold her, he feels big. Bigger than her father, bigger than the room. Too big for the room to get its teeth around him. He fills the room, and the room shrinks back from him, recoiling from the taste of ash and fire on its lapping tongue, and the room is afraid.
And then her brother draws her deeper into himself, guiding her until her cheek presses against the angle of his shoulder.
And the room pulls back from her, too.
It is the only tenderness Suzume has known in so very, very long. How many times has she imagined her brother in the doorway, in place of her father? How many times?
"Are you real?" She asks him, and her voice breaks around the word, gone thin and hoarse in the hungry, frightened room. "Are you real?"
And before he can answer her, she turns her head, mouth pressed to his shoulder, and screams.
The noise is muffled, but it rips through her all the same. She trembles violently with the effort of it, light-headed, starved for air. Taking in another breath, she buries her hands in his loose, warm shirt, and screams again, long and drawn out and awful.
Her brother isn't like her father, though. His fingers do not bite into her. Instead, they drift from her head to the back of her neck, contouring to the curve of it with a warm, gentle pressure. "Let it out," he tells her. His thumb finds a tender spot behind her ear, moving in slow, rhythmic circles. "Let it out, for me."
It's a demand, Suzume is cognizant enough to realize. Someone always demanding something of her in this doorway, she thinks. The room makes everyone hungry.
But at least her brother is gentle with the way he says it, gentle in the way he touches her. He holds her while she screams like she is something fragile and precious, and when she cannot scream anymore – when she can only weep and shudder, exhausted with the effort of it – he holds her, still.
"It's okay," he tells her. "I'm gonna make it okay."
"Dad's gonna come back," she whispers, and coughs, choking on her own words. It hurts to speak; she's screamed too long and too much. Gone much too long without speaking to anyone at all. "Dad's gonna come back – we have to go, please, we have to go – "
"No."
Suzume jerks away from him, panic settling into her. The door is open. They can leave, she thinks; they can go. She wants to be anywhere, as long as it's not here. Her head swims. She wants to be anywhere but here, as long as it's with him. "The room – please, I don't want to be here anymore – he'll make me stay in the room and he'll – he'll hurt you, Nii-chan, please, please, please – "
Tugged free of him, Suzume can see his face much more clearly now than she'd been able to from the bed. It is her brother's face, looking back at her, but put together wrong. The shadows under his eyes are so deep and dark now, hollowed out like the room has left her, and his jaw is –
Suzume touches his jaw with trembling fingers.
"You can't fix it." It's a terrible absolution. Forgiveness, freely and preemptively given, but she doesn't want it. He already knows she can't fix it, because of course he does. Like the much lighter scars from before, she's too late to fix this – too late to make this better.
He doesn't even want her to try – and it's not fair, it's not fair, it's not fair, because more than anything in the world, Suzume wants to, needs to –
And to not be able to –
Lifting his hand to hold hers against his cheek, she can see it for the first time – see that it's wrong, too. The metal set in the shadow skin of his palm and in the ruined flesh of his gaunt cheek feels so sharp against her hand.
Instinctively, she leans forward, pressing her forehead to his. His eyes are a familiar flame in the dark, steadily burning into her, mere centimeters from her own. "I'm sorry," she says, crying softer, now. Crying worse, because it's worse, because this is so much worse. "I'm sorry – I'm sorry."
"C'mon, Suzu." His eyes, so bright and smoldering still, seem to soften. His lashes grow heavy. There's a smile in his voice. "It's not your fault."
Angling his head, his nose brushes hers – and then he's pressing a kiss as soft as a breath against her tear-wet cheek. It's close enough to her mouth that her head swims again, this time for an entirely different reason.
And she can feel him smiling now, feel the upward curve of his mouth as his lips part and he laughs quiet against her skin. "Dizzy?"
She just nods, closing her eyes. Suzume's throat hurts too much, and she's – she's embarrassed.
She wants to pull away, and hide her face in her hands.
And wants to lean into him more – ask for more, cry for it. Beg for it.
She's been so long lost to the familiar heat of his touch, and oh, it fills her in where the room had left her so empty, and the cold in her bones is melting, and her bones themselves are melting, and there's more want in her now than that awful disquiet because she's just been so, so lonely –
Her brother picks her up, because her limbs are liquid — because her body suddenly lacks any structure — and his laughter fills the awful room. She is a snowflake, now made a puddle in the hot, hot curve of his hands.
Weakly, she wraps her arms around his shoulders and, weaker still, nuzzles her face into the mess of his hair.
"I missed you," she whispers.
"Oh, yeah?" He turns and takes her out of the room. Behind them, the lightning fills the small space, the shadows skittering in the wake of the rolling thunder. Those desperate shadows cannot reach them anymore, though. Her brother carries her through the motionless darkness of hall. "Did you?"
At first, Suzume only nods. In this new and different dark, her eyes struggle to adjust, her fingers worrying at the collar of his shirt. Her chest feels tight. Her mouth is so dry.
She swallows it back. Her face is hot. "Yeah," she says, quietly. "So much."
His hand touches at the small of her back while he carries her down the first set of stairs to the second floor, drifting like slow, hot smoke up her spine. Suzume can feel it even through her shirt. It makes her shiver.
"How much?" Her brother asks.
They're on the second floor now – the floor with the other bedrooms. Her father's bedroom, and his office, both down one side. Down the other is Suzume's old bedroom, and –
Her mother's room.
She can see her mother's bedroom from here, down the right side of the landing. The door is closed, shut tight on what Suzume guesses is more emptiness.
Looking at it makes Suzume's stomach twist. It makes her chest tighter, her mouth dryer.
She has, of course, missed her mother. Risking her father's ire, Suzume had asked after her, again and again. "She's not any better," her father had always answered. "You have to be good. You have to wait."
And of course Suzume wanted her mother to get better, and she tried so hard to be good, just for that. She wanted her mother to get better, and she wanted her to come home.
But life at the apartment has been so different from life at the big house.
In the big house, Suzume's whole world had been her mother, and her mother's whole world had been Suzume. Every minute, every hour, together, always together. The pair of them confined together in that small, glass-walled world, Mama was the sun that Suzume rotated around, and the moon under which she slept.
And then, the apartment, and Mama working, always working. Between school and work, Suzume was lucky to have her mother for two hours a day, and even then, Mama was tired.
Even then, Mama was sad.
Suzume has long been acquainted with missing her mother. Long before the illness and the long sleep and the hospital stole her away, her mother was already mostly gone, little left of her but bones and gristle and the memory of something better.
No, even before the return to the big house, Mama was an old hurt. A long-time and familiar hurt, Mama had become a scar that ached with the coming of rain or the changing of seasons. Suzume missed her mother desperately because she loved her, but as the months wore on, even Suzume's fear for her mother's health – much like her sadness – grew dull.
Her brother, though…
Her brother, always in the park, always waiting – always, for her.
Her tall and uncannily charming older brother, with his scars along his cheeks, somehow more handsome for it. More handsome than Katsuki. More handsome than any boy she's ever known or seen, even on TV.
Her cool and incredibly astute older brother, listening to her, knowing her, so wise and so wonderful, even if he was terrible –
Even if he poked at her and pinched at her and teased her. Even if he was merciless.
Oh, how she has missed him. Missed him, missed him, thought-she'd-never-see-him-again-missed-him. How she's imagined him every day, stealing into her room, come to save her, come to take her away far far away, back to the park. How she's imagined him leaning over her when the nightmares that come every night leave her reeling and gasping and crying alone in her bed –
Alone in that heavy, awful dark of the third floor room, she'd imagined him kissing her back to sleep –
Suzume looks up and stares at the closed door of her mother's room and swallows. Her throat hurts. She swallows again, and her stomach feels sick.
The palm of his hand is a press of fire between her shoulder blades, holding her closer to himself. Always so close.
Always.
Rejoined, she clings tighter to him.
"More than anything." It's a confession she whispers to him, because to speak it out loud feels like heresy – a truly unspeakable crime no good daughter would ever commit. She only tells him because she knows he already knows. There's no secret to it. Even unspoken, Suzume still feels it. Even unspoken, she's still guilty, guilty, the worst daughter anyone could ever hope for –
But saying it aloud – saying it aloud…
Suzume knows somehow that he wants it, and Suzume aches to make him happy. Wants so much to make him smile.
A family of two, he'd said.
And he's the one who's here for her, isn't he?
Mama's door is shut, shut tight. Behind it? Another empty room.
"I – I thought I'd never see you again," Suzume says, trying very hard not to think of her mother. Instead, she tries very hard to think of her brother.
Her brother, and the way he's holding her.
And she feels terrible, because it actually isn't really hard. It isn't even a little hard. She feels terrible, because it's easy not to think about her mother – because it's so much easier to think about her brother, instead.
"And… I missed you more than anything."
"Mmm." Her brother, of course, understands her. He understands the weight of this terrible, guilt-ridden confession, and he hums his obvious approval, and with her chest pressed to his and her legs gathered up around his waist, she can feel it inside of her. It's more intimate than the thunder, much lower, much softer. Deeper, somehow, and gentle in a way that leaves her feeling squirmy and strange.
Her brother moves off the landing then, carrying her down the last flight of steps to the ground level. She watches the door to her mother's room drift up, and up, and up, until she can no longer see it between the barred railing of the landing.
"You're so cute, aren't you? The best little sister a big brother could ask for." His voice is low, his lips near her ear. She can feel the metal set under his mouth brush against her throat when he talks. He breathes fire into her, making ash and dust of the bad things she feels.
"Oh, Suzu," he says, and like an over-choked forest wiped clean by that cleansing fire, her adoration for him is left to bloom dizzyingly in the new-fertile soil. "Suzu, Suzu. My good, good girl."
Late November; 17 years.
Suzume feels like nothing in Dabi's arms as he carries her down the stairs.
It's not like she'd ever been a big girl. Short for her age, he remembers her as she was almost a year ago, slight even by the standards of children. She'd seemed ephemeral then, like a fragile spring blossom stayed too late in the season – one even a mild wind might unseat and carry away at any given moment.
And now, ten months later, there seems to be even less of her. She is a shade of herself, grown too thin. The way her pale skin stretches tight over her tender bird-like bones leaves his blood prickling, simmering with a white-hot and blinding sort of anger.
More injustice, still. It is as an accelerant to the already fitful inferno of his hatred.
Dabi breathes in slowly through his nose. The air stokes the fire in the pit of his stomach, hot all through his chest. He sets his teeth instead. It won't do to come undone so early, he thinks as he descends; this must be less of a wildfire and more of a controlled burn, after all.
At the bottom of the stairs, standing now in the vast space of the living room, there is the sound of machines coming to life. Beeping electronics chime in a cacophonous chorus throughout the house, and then the room is full of artificial white light.
The power is back on, just as expected.
Suzume makes a dismayed noise and her grip on his shirt tightens. He can feel her small knuckles through the thin cloth, pressed trembling against his shoulders – can feel the way she sucks in her breath when she buries her face in the crook of his neck.
"It's okay," Dabi tells her. He takes hold of the back of her neck again with hot fingers, rubbing at the spot behind her ear, again. It's fascinating, the way she seems to melt against him. It makes him smile. "It's just the power coming back on. It's supposed to do that. He's not back yet. Won't be for a bit."
"Can't we please just go?" Suzume whines the words, and were she not so close to his ear, Dabi thinks he wouldn't be able to hear her.
Quiet as she is, though, her voice is fraught with barely controlled terror.
"Go where?" Dabi carries her down a side hallway and into the kitchen. After spending hours pouring over the details of this house, he knows exactly where it is.
"Anywhere!" It's a breathless if subdued exclamation. She pulls back from his shoulder to look at him, really look at him, brows drawn together tightly, her eyes seeking his own with insistent purpose.
They are violet, as Dabi remembers them. Glassy, too, with the threat of tears – always a crybaby, Suzu. Always a cute little crybaby with her wet, amethyst eyes.
But there's purple under her frowning eyes too, now. They look bruised and fitfully sleepless, set above newly sharp cheekbones that are far too pronounced. Her face had been babyfat once, rounded and soft and easily pinched until they were a cute, flushed pink.
Pinched now, her cheeks would surely bruise like her eyes, instead.
So her father would take even fucking this from him. Inwardly, Dabi seethes, and the fire grows hungrier still. Bones, and meat, and blood – smoke, and ash –
Outwardly, though, he regards Suzume's tortured expression impassively. "No."
Her face immediately crumples in on itself. This, at least, remains unchanged. Suzume has always been so painfully candid, so easy to read. Her face shows too much, too easily, always so unguarded.
Dabi sets Suzume down on the kitchen counter and can't help but smile at the way her hands chase after him when he tries to straighten up. Grasping at his shirt in a clumsy attempt to keep him from pulling away, she looks up at him, wide-eyed.
"Please," she whispers, frantically. The frustration coloring her features gives way to bewildered panic, and Dabi knows she isn't asking him to leave, anymore.
Brushing her hands away, Dabi takes her face in both of his hands instead. His thumbs find the hollows under her eyes and brush the thin skin there, moving slowly over the too-prominent bones just beneath them. In the silence between them, Suzume blinks a few times, and casts her eyes down and to the side, as if unable to meet his gaze. Her lips part, fractionally. He can feel her breath on his face, paced quick and irregular.
He smiles again, despite the question on his own lips. "Has your dad been starving you?"
In the firm grip of his hand, he can feel her try to shake her head. When she realizes she can't move, her eyes flicker back up to him. "No – he does. I just… my stomach hurts all the time. I feel sick a lot."
"And you don't sleep, either."
This time, she closes her eyes. "I have bad nightmares. The room upstairs – it scares me."
Dabi lets his hands drop away from her face. She opens her eyes then, and she looks up at him, lost and sad, her hands fidgeting in her lap. Folding, unfolding. Folding, and unfolding.
He touches the top of her head, brushing the backs of his fingers down the spill of her hair. Then, he touches the tops of her hands, twisting in her lap, fingertips tracing the hills and valleys of her knuckles. Suzume takes a deep breath, and seems to still.
"Hold on a sec, okay?"
He moves from her to the big, double-door refrigerator. It's well stocked – more than enough to feed three people. Suzume, her father –
And the woman who'd been the one to accept the package. Dabi had made sure to find her first when he'd picked the lock of the back door to let himself in. Featherlight's new and much younger girlfriend hadn't seen him when he'd skulked up on her in the heavy quiet of the darkened corridor, too distracted by the blackout and her unresponsive phone.
Hadn't seen him, no – but she'd heard him.
That hadn't mattered, in the end. She'd been easy enough to chase down. Featherlight's girlfriend knew the house well, but Dabi did, too. And Dabi was faster. Dabi was calm.
The woman – finding a strange man with blazing eyes and a horror show face leering at her from out of the sudden, new dark – was neither of those things.
He'd hit her when he caught her. She'd gone down with that first strike; she was no hero, after all. And standing over her, watching her drag herself across the floor, silent hysteria making her limbs flail graceless as if they'd all come undone from her, like each part of her had a reeling, animal mind of its own –
Dabi had wanted to kick her, and kick her, and kick her.
The anger was in him, then. It was in his clenched fists, where his fire blossomed to blue and monstrous life, and in his tight-snapped jaw, where the fire burned, too, lapping behind his teeth. It was in his blood and he was alive with it, and he wanted to kick her and he wanted to hurt her and he wanted to hear her scream until he was alive, alive, alive with it – and she was dead, dead, dead.
But it needs to be special, Dabi reminded himself. The need for it was in him like the fire was, that ravenous lust for something terrible, yes, but it was the need to vent his rage on something that mattered. The kill had to be special, and this woman, well, she wasn't anything. She wasn't what he wanted. Guilty by association, maybe, but he knew she wouldn't be enough. He knew he'd regret her being his first.
She was just a loose end for later, he told himself. Later. Later.
He'd deal with her, later.
The closet he'd left her in – unconscious, gagged and tightly restrained – is smaller than the refrigerator in front of him now. The refrigerator is big, and cold, its breath a comfort over his skin.
There are many things inside of it. Even so, it's not hard to find what he's looking for.
Leftover rice in a tupperware container and a pair of eggs.
Taking them, he sets the container of rice on the counter and hands the eggs to Suzume. "Where's the furikake? The soy sauce?" He asks her. "Bowls, too."
Wordlessly, she gestures with an egg filled hand, first at a cabinet next to the fridge and then at another across the kitchen. Her eyes track him as he trudges through the room, his boots loud on the ceramic tiles, gathering up the rice seasoning, soy sauce and bowls. When he comes back to her, she scoots a bit to the side on the counter and opens the drawer that had just been behind her dangling legs. There are chopsticks in the drawer. Dabi retrieves a pair.
"You're not supposed to wear shoes inside." Suzume's eyes drift down from his face, and she leans forward a bit to get a better look at his scuffed boots. There's no judgment to her voice; rather, she seems awe-struck by his bold irreverence, eyes wide as she regards the offending footwear.
Dabi snorts as he pushes rice into the bowls, finishing them both off with a splash of water from the faucet. "Maybe if your mom still lived here. It's just your dad's house now, though." When he turns to put the bowls into the microwave, he makes a point of grinding his heel into the floor. The rubber squeals in angry protest, and Suzume gasps at the dark spot left on the otherwise pristine tile.
It's childish, Dabi knows, this small slight. In the past ten months, he has ruined lives. He has tortured men.
And tonight, he will kill for the very first time.
Dabi doesn't care. Something about the stark, black mark on the white, white tile –
And the way Suzume stares down at it with a conflicting mix of admiration and horror, her peach-gold hair a spill of waves around her –
Oh, it soothes him.
The microwave beeps; the three and a half minutes are over. Suzume looks up from the spot on the floor, and Dabi looks up from her.
The bowls, fresh from the microwave, should feel hot in his hand with the way the rice steams in the cool air. Dabi wonders what that might be like as he takes turns making a little divet in each bowl's mound of rice with the chopsticks.
Suzume watches his hands work as if they are the most fascinating things in the world. So transfixed, she almost starts when he holds an empty one out to her, palm up and open. "Egg."
Solemn now, as if she were a nurse in surgery and he the doctor, Suzume passes him the egg like it were a scalpel. "What're you doing?"
Dabi taps the egg on the side of one bowl and neatly cracks it over the divet in the hot rice. "What's it look like?"
Suzume pulls a face, swinging her legs a little bit. "Making… food?"
"There you go." Dabi whips the egg into the rice, and her attention is fully on his hands again, watching him stir, round and round. Between the tiny grains, the egg mixes, frothing. "Glad to see your brain didn't rot out your ears with all the not eating you've been doing."
"Brains don't do that." She sounds suspicious, but unsure. "Mine didn't."
Dabi grins down at the egg-yellow rice. "Yeah, 'cause I got here in time." Tipping soy sauce into it, he stirs it some more. "One week more, and you'd be done for for sure. Not like you got a lot to work with."
"Would not." Suzume huffs agitatedly as he sprinkles some furikake over the now fully-coated rice, but there's something like excitement in her when she takes the bowl and chopsticks from him. Fixing his own bowl with a fresh pair of chopsticks from the drawer, he watches her stare down at her food from the corner of his eye.
"You trying to absorb it via osmosis?" He taps her bowl with a finger between shaking furikake over his mixed rice. "Eat."
She looks up at him, eyebrows raised. "What's osmosis?"
Dabi laughs, and Suzume's cheeks flush warm at the sound. It feels like it used to, back in the park. It makes him want to pinch her, but her cheeks are so –
Dabi frowns. "Eat," he says, again, mind back on the woman in the closet. Back on Featherlight, at the ranking event –
Due home soon.
Chastised, Suzume lowers her head, pushing her chopsticks through the rice absently. Dabi watches her try to be furtive as she watches him out of the tops of her eyes, so he makes a show of putting his bowl to his lips, pushing a generous helping of rice into his open, waiting mouth.
With her bowl cradled in her small hands, Suzume leans towards him. "Can – can I have yours instead?"
Dabi takes another bite, hiding his new grin behind the tilted bowl. "It's the same thing you got," he says into the rice. He shakes his head, mock-somber. "Maybe I was too late. Maybe your brain is already gone."
Suzume's nose crinkles. "It's not that, and my brain is fine – "
Another bite. "You just didn't notice. Probably leaked out while you were sleeping. Bet half of it is gone at least – "
"No, no! It's different, and – please, please don't eat it all – " With one hand, she takes hold of his shirt, her expression one of open anguish.
"Different how?" Dabi smiles down at her, because he knows exactly why. "You saw me make them both."
Suzume's eyes move between her own bowl, his bowl, and his face. Her brows crease, and she works her bottom lip with her teeth. "It just – it just is different."
And oh, Dabi wants to pick at her. He wants to needle, and he wants to draw it out – and god, he wants to be direct, too, cruel in the confrontation with what he knows:
Suzume and her sweet, little crush. Suzume wanting an indirect kiss from her awful big brother.
But she's been through so much. He can spare her this much.
He can at least be indirect. "It's 'cause it's mine, isn't it?"
Suzume – her pink cheeks, now red – dips her head. Through her hair, Dabi can make out the delicate curve of her ears, a deep scarlet even against the brilliance of her hair.
Her voice in the expansive, bright kitchen is so small. "...yeah."
"Well," he says, and the anger isn't so hot in him, now. "Take a bite of yours first, then."
Finally, and almost eagerly, Suzume does as she's told. Dabi watches her straighten up just enough to eat, using the chopsticks to pick out the smallest, tiniest bite. She chews. She swallows. And then she looks up him, eyes big and round and expectant in her flushed face.
He holds out his bowl and chopsticks. "Trade."
Suzume sets her bowl on the counter first so she can accept his with both hands. Her fingers brush his in the exchange, and he feels her fingers pat once – and then twice – against the back of his knuckles.
So fucking cute.
Dabi picks her bowl up off the counter. In front of him, Suzume cradles his bowl in her hands as if it is something to be venerated, staring down into the mouthfuls of missing rice.
Little sentimental childish rituals, Dabi thinks, still smiling. "Try it."
She does as she's told then, too. Lifting his old chopsticks, she picks up a sticky glob of egg-rice from the edge of the part he's already eaten and brings it to her mouth. He watches it disappear between her parted lips.
Chew. Chew. Swallow.
Suzume closes her eyes.
Dabi doesn't need to ask her how she likes it. Suzume looks as if she has never tasted anything so delicious in her life. Under the bright fluorescent lights, her eyelashes gleam like gold fire against her cheeks, and the tension bleeds from her face, and she sighs, gone soft and pleased.
But Dabi is greedy. "How is it?"
Her eyes open, and they meet his, shyly. "The best," she whispers.
So selfish. "The best, huh?"
She nods, so serious. So precious. "Better than anything I've ever had."
"It's just egg on rice," he says, slyly. He's hungry, and not for rice. She's not been the only one left to starve over these ten long months, after all. "Same as what you had before."
"No – it's better than mine," she says, stubbornly. The crinkle in her nose is back. He wants to smooth it out with his thumb. He wants to pinch, in the slight curve of her hip, where there's still enough of her left to pinch.
Dabi's wry smile widens. He is a glutton. He wants more. "Why?"
And because she is good, and because she is sweet, and because she is his, Suzume gives it to him. "Because you made it," she says, softly. She looks down into the rice. "Because it's yours."
Dabi settles his hand first on the top of her head, fingers working their way into the long waves of her hair. Then, he lets his hand follow the curve of her face, cupping her still-flushed cheek. She looks up at him, meeting his gaze finally with bashful deference, and leans into his touch –
And, grinning down at her, Dabi is satisfied.
(For now.)
"Good," he says. "Now finish it and lick it clean, yeah? We've lost enough of you already."
Late November; 9 years.
Suzume eats, and not just because her brother asks her too. She eats because she finds, for the first time in many long months, that she is actually hungry.
Starving, even.
Egg on rice, egg on rice – her mother has made this dish for her so many times. It's quick, she knows, and easy. It's good. A healthy, easy breakfast. She likes it.
Her brother's egg on rice, though, is something different. Savory in her mouth, salty on her tongue – and her cheeks warm, knowing his lips have touched it – that they've been on the chopsticks, too.
It is the best thing she has ever had, and when the bowl is empty, she almost cries.
Almost.
(She doesn't want to give her brother any more ideas about her being a crybaby.)
So instead, Suzume hops down off the counter to help her brother wash the dishes. She watches him work the bowls one at a time in the sink, the soap creaming under his long, thin fingers, the suds gleaming milk white. Then, she watches him rinse them off, the soap running in thinning, shining rivulets down the drain –
And then he hands them to her.
She's careful to work the towel around the bowls. The water seeps into the fabric, and now the bowls are damp, and now they are dry. She sets them on the counter gingerly, side by side, like she stands beside her brother, her shoulder pressed against his arm.
He pats her head when they're done, and against the cold tile of the kitchen, her bare toes curl. Taking the bowls and the furikake and the soy sauce, her brother tucks them back into their respective cabinets. The washed chopsticks, too, join their siblings in the drawer, and the kitchen is spotless again.
It's as if they were never there at all. The thought makes her a little sad.
Her brother, though, holds his arms out to her. "Let's go to the living room and wait, huh?" he asks, and she's thankful for that. It's hard to feel as sad or overwhelmed when he gets his arms around her –
Even if they are a little unsettling to look at.
And oh, it's hard to feel anything but dizzy wonder as he lifts her and holds her, so close to himself. It's hard, it's hard, but she tries. There are so many things, so many things –
So many things she can't make sense of.
Asking him what he means when he says they should wait is too frightening a thing for Suzume to even consider.
So, as he carries her out of the kitchen and into the living room, past the sparsely decorated side table and the wall pictures and the strangely shaped chairs, she asks him something else. "Why are you here?"
"For you." He says it with a smile that says you-should-know-this-Suzu, stopping finally in front of the sofa. Even if the answer doesn't surprise her, it does make her blush.
And then, suddenly, her brother collapses backwards into the big, fluffy couch. By virtue of him holding her, Suzume goes down with him, unable to contain a surprised squeal.
The fall, mercifully, doesn't hurt. The couch catches them both, cradles them both, pillowing around them thickly like white, overstuffed clouds. But where the fall doesn't hurt, her brother's laughter at her outburst nips at her. Always so impossibly composed, he settles back languidly into the couch much like a cat bedding into something warm.
By contrast, it takes her a moment to orient herself. She pushes back clumsily on his thighs, closer to his knees, her own legs an awkward straddle over his his.
As usual, it's hard to look at him this close. His attention is wholly on her, and her mind is a whirl, a twist, a tumble, gone too-fuzzy. What had she asked? What had she wanted to know?
His arms fall away from her back, and his hands settle over the fabric of her pajama pants, stretched over her thighs.
Suzume flounders, looking away from him. It's surreal being in the living room with him, like this. It's surreal being in the house with him like this. The house never has guests, and he is something strange and dark in this too-bright room made of glass and white furniture. Between the two of them, the room settles into a quiet and intense silence.
And Suzume knows that if she looks back up, he will be looking at her with his bright, impossibly blue eyes. She can feel them, just as she can feel his hands on her legs.
"But," she says, floundering still, looking down at her hands, and at his, touching her. "But how?"
"How what?" She knows he knows what she means. She also knows he loves to make things difficult. The way his smile quirks wider in her periphery when she puffs out her cheeks is confirmation enough of that.
"How did you get here?"
"Took the train," he says, serenely. His fingers crawl like slow spiders over her thighs. "And then I walked."
It takes everything in her to force herself to look up at him again. It's hard when he smiles, and especially so when the smile gets into his eyes like it does, now. The ceiling light gleams off the metal set in his cheeks – staples, she realizes – but his eyes are brighter still, gleaming and knife sharp like the ones in the kitchen.
"Please," she says, hating the whine in her own voice. She wants to sound composed. She wants to sound as grave as she feels. "This is really serious and it's dangerous. I just wanna know – "
"Serious and dangerous, huh?" She can feel him pinching the fabric of her pants between his fingers – feel the way it tightens around her leg. That he doesn't pinch her is a mercy she is sure he wants her to know. "Great time for a conversation."
"But you're the one acting like it's not!" It rushes out of her in a cry.
Dabi watches her from under the heaviness of his thick lashes. Smiling, smiling, always so self-possessed. It makes her feel childish by contrast – childish, and stupid, and dramatic. "It's not dangerous," he says, and his voice is smooth and cool. It washes over her, like waves. "Not for me, and since I'm here, it ain't dangerous for you, either."
"But I don't understand," she whispers. She reaches out and fidgets at his shirt with graceless hands, then at the collar of her own shirt. "I don't understand how you're here, and I don't understand how it's safe – my dad is – "
"Featherlight." She can't help the way her body jerks when she hears her father's hero name on her brother's tongue. He's still smiling, though, because of course he is, looking very pleased with himself.
"Oh, yes," he says, as if by way of answer to the horrified look she fixes him with. "I know."
And it doesn't make any sense. It doesn't. Her brother, who Suzume has seen outside the park only once, her brother, the ghost – her brother, who knows everything, who knows everything, impossible and infallible, and yet always so unknowable –
"How?" Her voice trembles with the word, insistent.
"You're my little sister," he says, shrugging, as if this, too, is obvious. He lifts one hand and presses it to the tip of her nose. "Of course I'd know." His hand trails down her face, and he takes hold of her chin. "You're my business." The way he shakes her by her jaw is gentle and familiar in a way that makes Suzue's insides ache. "You're my business to know."
This is a nothing answer. Somehow, though, it is also an everything answer.
"Do me a favor," he says, lazy as always. His hands – both of them – are back on her legs, a steady drum of hot fingertips high up on her thighs. It makes her feel hot. It makes her feel cold, too. "You've seen your mom cook, yeah?"
In the big house, when Mama was there, there had been a lot of time that needed filling up, and Mama was happy to fill that time up with many things. Together, in bed, Mama would read books to Suzume in funny voices, and when it rained, there were movie marathons on the couch under thick, plush blankets. There were piano lessons in the music room, and cooking lessons in the kitchen. Mama could do many things, and Mama was eager to teach – and Suzume was eager to learn them all.
And, oh, Mama had loved cooking.
Dazedly, Suzume nods.
"Good," her brother says. "Go to the kitchen, then. Bring me her sharpest knife. The one you see her use most when she cuts up meat and bone."
Suzume can only stare at him. He smiles back at her. He drums his fingers, tap-tap-tap, rain on the glass. Let me in, it says. Let me in.
Lightning outside. Thunder in the room, and inside of her, too.
"Up with you, now, Suzu." Her brother's voice is syrup thick and sweet, sweet, sweet. "Be a good girl."
And she's up off his lap, then, on quick pattering feet, spilling like a flurry into the fresh-cleaned kitchen.
The knife block is near the refrigerator. There are many knives there, set into the wood. Suzume knows them all. Little paring knives for littler details, the wavy toothed bread knife for the toasty breakfast pastries her mother would sometimes make. Knives for carving, and for fruit, knives to cut steak, knives for sandwiches. Knives for everything and nothing in particular. Knives of every type one could imagine.
And in the biggest slot, at the very top of the block: the cleaver. Suzume has watched her mother make short work of meat and bones with that large, shining blade. Sweeping up on her tiptoes, she reaches out a trembling hand to unsheathe it from the block.
It always looked heavy and terrifying in her mother's delicate milk-white hand, and it feels exactly so in Suzume's own. Her reflection in it is blurry, a girl peering back at her as if through fogged glass, eyes too wide for her face.
Suzume doesn't want to look at it – but she can't look away.
Obediently – and much more slowly – she carries it back into the living room. On the couch – watching her with that sly cat smile – her brother waits.
"Oh," he says, sounding very pleased. Suzume can feel her heartbeat in her toes, and in her hands, and in her throat. Light floods in through all the big windows. Thunder crashes between them. "Nice and big."
"What's this for?" She asks, holding the knife closer to herself.
He doesn't answer. Sitting up, he holds out his hand to her, his eyes fixed on the knife. "Let me see it."
"What's it for?" She asks again, louder this time. The cleaver shakes in her hands. She looks down at it. She looks at her reflection. There is ice in her bones again. The girl with the wavy hair looking back at her from the foggy window of the world inside the knife looks frightened.
Her brother snaps his fingers. When she looks up, he is not looking at the knife anymore. He is looking at her. "Give it to me before you cut yourself."
Carefully, carefully, Suzume hands her brother the cleaver – the cleaver her mother used for meat. The cleaver her mother used for bones.
The sharpest knife in the house.
Her brother handles the knife with an easy kind of confidence. He turns it around in his hands, judging its weight in his hands, his finger following the length of it along its wide, broad side.
Then, he touches his index finger to the blade.
"No!" Suzume cries.
There is blood on the blade, and on his finger. It drips down his hand, and down the blade, like soapy rivulets in the sink. It lands on his dark pants, and she can see the way it makes tiny domes on the fabric. "Huh," he says, grinning. "That really is sharp. Didn't even feel it."
Suzume waits until he moves his hand away from the blade to surge forward. Gathering up his wounded hand in both of her own, she presses her thumbs into the meat of his palm that's still flesh and not wrong.
Still holding the knife, she can feel her brother's eyes on her. He doesn't pull away. He lets her press the gold light into him, warm and soft – lets her face blanch and her mouth twist with the effort and ache of it.
It doesn't hurt much. It stings in her hands, and her eyes sting with tears, too, but the sour-sick feeling in her stomach was already there long before now.
There's still blood on his hand, and on hers now, too, but the wound is gone as if it was never there before. Still in the grip of her hands, her brother rubs his thumb and index finger together.
"You handled that a lot better than you used to." Her eyes meet his, and he's smiling still, but his eyes are cold fire.
"It was small," Suzume says, feeling small herself. "Small things don't hurt me much."
"Nah." Her brother leans forward and sets the awful cleaver, still wet with his blood, down on the coffee table just behind her. Now his arms are around her again, pulling her in. Now they are pushing her down. The couch rises up to meet her where her brother presses her shoulders into it, and now her brother is above her, filling her field of vision completely. "Nah, even little things messed you up before."
Suzume closes her eyes. Even with her eyes closed, she can see the knife on the table. She can feel it, the weight of it in her hand.
Her mother, pushing it so easily through meat and bone, meat and bone.
"I got used to it," she says. The words feel thick in her mouth.
"You got used to it." Her brother repeats her words, and his voice is cold fire, too. His hand has her jaw – gentle, gentle. Suzume tries not to think about the knife. Tries not to think about his hand around the knife. "Look at me."
She does, opening her eyes – and she's back in the park again, with him looming over her, centimeters from her face. "Mama is – " Suzume takes in a shuddering breath. "She's sick. Mama is in the hospital."
Her brother's eyes narrow considerably. There's a tension in his face that's decidedly unlike him, crinkling in the dark ruined flesh under his eyes and pulling strangely around his mouth. "Oh," he says, and Suzume thinks he sounds almost surprised. "Is she?"
Suzume swallows. "Yeah. And Dad still – he still needed someone to heal him."
Her brother's terrible smile twitches. "So you're used to it, now."
"Nii-chan," she whispers, touching his face haltingly. Pleadingly. "Please don't – please don't be angry. I didn't want to."
The tension around his eyes and in his mouth softens, just a little. His eyes, though, still look terrible, as if they could burn down the whole world and feel nothing for it. "Don't misunderstand, Suzu. I'm not mad at you. It's not your fault; I told you that, didn't I? You remember, don't you?"
Suzume swallows again. Tries to nod in the grip of his hand. "Uh-huh."
"Good. Good – 'cause I meant that. I did. I know you don't want anything to do with him. I know, I know. I know it's been hard for you." His hand lets go of her jaw. His fingers trace the slope of her cheek, barely there. His voice is so quiet, so soft, so guarded – a butcher's blade, still in a knife block. "He's made it so hard, hasn't he? It's been so hard for you. Look at you, wasting away. You look awful. Look at what he's done to you."
"Nii-chan, please – " Her voice quavers as she begs. "We can leave. We can just go. Please, can't we just go?"
"Your brain didn't seep out in your sleep, even if you were starving." His hand is on her chin again. "You're a smart girl, I know you are. I like to play like you're not, 'cause I'm a mean, awful big brother – but you're a smart girl. Aren't you?"
How does he do this? He calls her dumb, and she wants to argue –
And now he calls her smart, and Suzume wants to shake her head. She wants to play dumb. Wants to tell him he's wrong, he's wrong, tell him she's not smart, she's not –
"It's okay if you can't answer," he says, still so gentle. "I know you're scared. But that's why I'm here, you know? I'm here so I can handle the things that are scary for you. I'm here to do what needs to be done, to do the things you need doing, but can't do on your own. I'm here so I can make them go away. That's what big brothers are supposed to do."
"Please, Nii-chan – not like this." Suzume stares up at him, helpless.
"You know it has to be done, Suzu." His thumb ghosts her mouth.
And she's crying again – crying because what he says is terrible. Crying because what he says is true.
They could leave. They could run. Her brother is cunning, she knows. Her brother knows so much, so much more than he should. Her brother, the phantom, stitched up like a monster now, with his ice-fire eyes and his toothy, knife-blade grin, hungry for meat and bone.
Meat and bone.
But Suzume's father is cunning, too, and her father is older, and her father has been a monster for a very long time.
They could leave, yes. But her father would follow. Her father is stubborn. Her father is vindictive.
"You don't want it," her brother says, "But you do. I know you do. Deep inside of you, buried so deep where it's safe, where you can't feel it. You do. You want to be free of him, don't you? And Suzu, there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing bad about that. Of course you'd want to be free. Who doesn't want to be that? You're a good girl; there's nothing wrong with you. There's nothing bad about you."
Suzume thinks about bringing her brother the knife. She thinks about it in his hands. Meat and bone, she thinks. She says nothing.
"I'll do the bad thing for you. Even if you tell me to stop, I'll do it. This is the only time I can do it. You understand? Even if you beg me to stop. You don't have a choice." His smile is serene again. "You can't stop me. I want to do this for you. I'll make the choice for you. And don't worry. Don't feel bad. It's not a burden. More than doing it for you – oh, Suzu, I wanna do it for me."
More absolution, and it's terrible. Somehow, it's terrible still.
"Why?" Suzume shudders with the effort it takes to form the words. There is acid in her throat, watery in her mouth. She cannot taste her egg on rice, anymore.
"Because you're my little sister." Her brother says it like he says most things: confidently, like it's the most obvious thing in the world. "Because no one fucks with what's mine."
Suzume thinks of her father, and of the big house. She thinks of being locked up in the third floor room for months and months and months, crying, always crying, the room so hungry for her fear and her sadness and her broken heart full of love for her brother. And she thinks of her brother in the doorway of the upstairs room, come for her, just like she'd thought about, just like she'd dreamed about. She thinks of him in the kitchen, trading bowls with her. She thinks of him on the couch, touching her, just moments ago.
Touching her now.
And then she thinks of him with the knife in his hand, that terrible butcher's cleaver, blood on his skin.
Her brother presses his finger to her lips. She knows it's the one he'd cut; she can see the blood on it, still. Reflexively, she kisses it, eyes burning in a way wholly different from the way his do.
Kiss it better, her Mama had always said after making Suzume's wounds go away. Kiss it better.
Her brother smiles down at her. He smiles for her. He smiles because of her.
Isn't this what she'd wanted? Isn't this what she'd wished for? Peering up at that too-high window when the skies were clear, staying up late so she could spend hours looking for shooting stars, just so she could wish and wish and wish that he'd come –
That he'd come. A real hero. A real hero –
Her brother smiles down at her. Isn't this what she wanted?
"I love you," she says, frightened, voice hoarse. Her heart pounds so hard in her chest that it hurts, and there's no flash of lightning, but the thunder crashes through her ribs over and over and over again all the same. "I love you," she says, again, and then, in barely a whisper, she says, "But I'm really scared."
"Oh," he says, drawing the sound out long and low, and suddenly he gathers her face up in both of his impossibly hot hands. There's something unknowable in his face, in the way that he looks at her then. There's something in his eyes when he touches his forehead to hers, touches his nose to hers. But isn't her brother always unknowable? "Oh, Suzu. God, yes, of course you do. You're so good. You're so cute, aren't you? Don't be scared. Your big brother loves you, too. He loves you so much he's gonna murder your father for you." He takes in a ragged breath, and his eyelids are heavy, and he's smiling, smiling, smiling at her. "I'm gonna kill him straight dead. Gonna make it all go away."
Suzume finds she can't quite breathe when he kisses her cheek – once, twice, a third time. He loves her. She's hot. He loves her. She's cold.
He loves her so much he'll…
Outside, the rain falls, a wash down the big glass windows. Soap in the sink. Blood on the blade. The knife, she thinks. Sharpest knife in the house. A cleaver, nice and big.
A cleaver for meat and bone.
Suzume thinks of her father, dead. Her father, meat and bone. She thinks of him, and she closes her eyes, and her brother's lips are there too, now. Softly, so softly, he kisses her tears away.
What a terrible gift, she thinks. Not something she wants, no –
But maybe it's like her brother says.
And isn't everything always just like he says?
Terrible, terrible, but it's something that needs doing. Something she can't do on her own.
It's a gift only her brother can give her.
AN: This chapter was supposed to handle the whole Featherlight stuff, buuuuut I missed Dabi/Suzu interacting so much that I just made it all about them. I'm just... love... writing them interacting forever. Ahhhh.
The next chapter should finish the Featherlight (f-f-f-f-finish himmmm), and after another chapter of clean up, I think I'll be done with my first act, and I can start time skipping some more in earnest. My plan is to have a bunch of vignette style scenes of Dabi and Suzume growing up together to catch them up to the present day and the MHA story at large.
I'm so excited to get them to more "present day" stuff, but hurrrrgle. ALSO EXCITED FOR THE FLUFFY/AWFUL SHIT IN BETWEEN.
Just excited in general, yeah baybeeeee!
