Coming to a bar was not Valentine's idea of relaxing after a long week at work, but he swore to whatever vengeful spirit was out there and watching him that if he didn't have something to take the edge off, he'd be likely to shoot someone at the office.
Which considering it was one of their legal fronts, would not be in his best interest.
Most people would not understand why Valentine's stress would lead to a shootout in the workplace, but then again, most people were not the right-hand of one Yuri Morozov, leader of the Russian vipers, oldest mafia that was still in a great deal of power to grace the earth.
Something that was much more involved than the average secretary position of scheduling meetings and handling phone calls, or even just the stuff people assumed the mafia did such as doing hits when Morozov asked him too.
No, Morozov was a publicly known rich man that ran so many businesses on top of the Russian vipers that Valentine paid a team just to help him manage everything.
So, Valentine was also publicly known as his personal assistant and had to manage at least fifty different large companies on top of the international dealings that the Vipers had.
And unlike with the Vipers where Valentine could shoot the brain-dead morons around him or break someone's fingers for bothering him with unimportant crap, he couldn't do the same in the above-board businesses.
So, for the last week, he also had to deal with the new hire for Spirited Co's sales manager being nothing short of a bitch to himself because he wasn't even half of her age, constantly insisting that he was a nepotism hire and being snide about him being a college dropout.
Which she was right about, he hadn't finished college and the degree he attempted to get wasn't even related to business in the first place, he was only in this position because Morozov put him in it.
That did not mean that he wasn't sick of the woman's whining and bullying of the staff without college degrees or who she thought was too young for their title.
Like Kyūryū whom she had been trying to sabotage deals and keep him working on lower dealings.
Naturally this meant that Valentine needed to find someone to replace her soon and he had been digging through a ton of files on replacements on top of everything else he was working on.
So yes, Valentine had damn well earned himself a drink at some no name bar and he would have happily enjoyed said drink if someone hadn't decided to approach him.
"Fancy seeing you here Heart-eyes." the person dryly commented.
Considering he was the only person on this side of the bar counter it was clearly directed at him, and Valentine turned to see just who he had to deal with now.
Only to be somewhat surprised to see Dabi of all people.
Sure, this bar wasn't that far from the South Side, but it didn't quite seem like the place Dabi would be interested in grabbing a drink from.
Then again this wasn't the kind of bar that he liked either, so that was hardly an argument for why Dabi couldn't either.
Dabi apparently took his silence as permission to sit in the stool next to him and flag the bartender for a drink "Get me a necromancer, put it in a shot glass with a salt lick," he told the woman before fishing out his fake ID.
The bartender looked it over before going off to fetch him wherever a 'necromancer' was, and Dabi turned back to him.
"You had a long day too Heart-eyes?" Dabi asked rhetorically.
Valentine huffed back "Try a long week." Valentine admitted, some of his accent slipping through his Japanese, letting his head rest on one of his hands.
Dabi was clearly here for more than a drink, most likely looking for information on something he couldn't ask Morozov's son for.
The boy liked to see the best in everyone, but he had no such biases coloring his vision of the man across from him.
Dabi certainly had some kind of mental miswiring, he wasn't an expert in the field and that wasn't the medicine he'd been studying in college so he wouldn't label Dabi's thinking, but it certainly leaned towards the same vein as sociopathic or psychopathic.
Valentine had seen plenty of both those sorts in his work and Dabi's eyes weren't that far off.
"I can only imagine," Dabi replied just as the bartender came back with his drink, Dabi grabbing and sipping it with his right hand, making the woman uncomfortable and she moved to stand at the other end of the counter.
To be fair to the bartender Valentine doubted many would be able to stand watching the bare muscles of Dabi's arm move around.
Valentine though found himself watching every twitch of muscle and with some honestly morbid curiosity.
Sue him, Dabi's arm was some of his best work considering they were able to keep the man's right arm at all after the damage he did to himself.
"Cut the crap and tell me what you want Dabi." Valentine told the enforcer.
Dabi huffed "What? Two dudes can't enjoy a drink together?" Dabi teasingly asked and Valentine fixed him with a look.
Dabi scoffed raising his hands.
"Fine, fine, I've got some questions for ya," Dabi confessed, sounding all put upon and even rolling his eyes.
"Ones you couldn't ask Deku?" Valentine questioned, just a bit miffed that Dabi was disrupting his break for something like this.
"Nah, I know you guys don't tell the Twinkie everything for plausible deniability and all that crap." Dabi answered, waving his right hand with some confidence he wouldn't hit anything with it.
Valentine sighed and dragged his hand down his face "Fine, what do you want to know?" Valentine relented.
"Your boss had something to do with my sperm donor dropping to fifth, didn't he?" Dabi stated more than guessed.
Valentine nodded, it hadn't been hard to convince people to vote for Hawks as the favorite, most in the districts knew Hawks was one of Deku's and of course they adored the hero that constantly defended Morozov's precious son.
The Vespas only asked people to come vote and a good chunk of the districts with legal ID had come out, which of course caused a higher turn out, and that was before taking the legal members of the Vespa family's votes into account either.
"Figures, was that part of the Twinkie's plan?" Dabi questioned.
"No. The future head of the Vespa's chose to do it independently, since having him at a lower rank would make protecting him even harder for the commission when it comes time to bring him to trial." Valentine answered shrugging his shoulders.
The biggest part they played in the plan was asking their workers to vote for Hawks and to produce IDs for those without legal ID for one reason or another.
"Also makes him easier to bump off if he ain't the decades old number two anymore, right?" Dabi commented twirling his glass rattling the three salt licks inside.
Valentine frowned and raised a questioning eyebrow towards Dabi.
"Killing your father would be pathetically easy... even Deku could do it with a pocketknife, but he doesn't want your father simply dead, and neither do you." Valentine responded, then sipped at his whiskey sour.
Dabi looked back at him with cold eyes, his mouth pulled back with a sneer.
Valentine was reminded of an old saying, of something being so cold it burned, that saying would probably fit Dabi very well as he leaned in to hiss.
"I'm pretty sure I want that son of a bitch dead."
Such a look would have successfully intimidated most people.
If all it took was a harsh look and some words being snarled at him to break composure, then Valentine would have been killed off years ago considering his line of work.
"No, I've seen that look before, it isn't the look of someone that wants another person dead and buried." Valentine told Dabi, a slight rise in the heat around them tipping Valentine off that Dabi was about to argue but Valentine continued to speak.
"Dabi, you have the eyes of someone that wants to see someone suffer beyond measure for what they've done to you and your family." Valentine said keeping his voice level.
A bitter chuckle came from Dabi, and he tilted his head as he asked "Is there a difference?"
Valentine hummed to himself, twirling his own half-full glass of liquor looking away from Dabi and then looking back at Dabi from the corner of one eye.
"As someone who's done both, I can assure you... there are many worlds of difference between merely killing someone and actually having your revenge on them." Valentine answered.
"Oh?" Dabi replied, the man's interest clearly peaked, and he leaned in "Enlighten me then, Heart-eyes." Dabi challenged a vicious smirk on his face.
Valentine huffed looking back to the bartender still staying far from their side of the bar and that no one was listening to their little conversation before resting his chin on the back of his hand.
"My first kill, the one that makes you a 'made man,' so to speak to use the pre-quirk term, was my own backstabbing mother that sold me to a rival group as a 'qualified' doctor to get out of her debt to them." Valentine began to tell Dabi with a scoff.
He hadn't even finished his first semester in the medical school that the bitch forced him to get into, because god forbid, he tried to be anything but a doctor like everyone else in their 'respectable' family.
Not when he had a perfect quirk for being a doctor like everyone else.
"I put the muzzle directly between her eyes as she bawled them out then shot her point blank, watched her brain and skull paint the wall after pulling the trigger." Valentine detailed for him.
His mind going back to how his ever so proud mother spent her last seconds on the planet pleading with her screwed-up son not to end her miserable life.
"But honestly, watching that pathetic woman beg on her knees will never compare to how it felt taking my sister's life a month later." Valentine said leaning towards Dabi, their noses almost touching.
"I made sure to rip every single thing she took joy in from her before I killed her. Got her fired and ruined her career, got her husband to divorce her and made sure that none of her three kids would ever want anything to do with her," Valentine gleefully recounted under his breath with a cruel smirk of his own on his face, noting how Dabi's heart rate was steadily increasing.
"I even made her question her own fucking sanity before I forced her to knees and told her she was about to die just like our mother did, and let me tell you Dabi," Valentine paused watching Dabi lick his lips.
"There will never be anything more satisfying than how utterly broken she looked before I put a bullet between her eyes, with her knowing that even if she begged me not to, she would have nothing because I made sure to raze everything she loved to the ground." Valentine informed Dabi before tilting his head.
"So, tell me Dabi," Valentine said teeing up a question he fully knew the answer to "Do you still want your father just dead? Or do you want to watch him spiral into total madness as everything he ever worked for is ripped away from him, one-by-one?"
Dabi, instead of answering proceeded to grab his tie with his right hand and instead asked him "Better question for you Heart-eyes, your place or a hotel?" a wicked glint to his turquoise eyes in the low lighting.
Valentine considered Dabi's offer.
Someone that was turned on by him describing how he tormented and murdered his family was almost certainly a glaringly red flag.
But then again as he let his eyes travel up and down Dabi's body, Valentine had to admit that Dabi likely wouldn't be a bad lay.
Eh, one night with Dabi wouldn't kill him.
Valentine placed down enough money to cover a round at the bar and freed his tie from Dabi's hand.
"Hotel, now get your ass in my car before I change my mind." Valentine told him as he dragged Dabi out of the bar with him, the other man not fighting in the slightest.
"You don't have to tell me twice Heart-eyes." Dabi replied clearly amused and smirking as he kept up with Valentine.
Geten returning from work after a long day: God my boss is a pain in the ass.
Dabi, having broken in to make his hangover his uncle's problem: Don't worry about that bitch, I've already dealt with it.
Geten facepalms: Dabi you can't threaten my boss.
Dabi, scoffs: Who said anything about threats? I'm just going to sleep with her boss and have him fire her.
Geten, takes a deep breath: Dabi, no.
Dabi, already texting Valentine for a booty call: Too late and you're welcome.
Geten internally screaming and 'nope's off to his room.
Dabi: BTW, you're out of milk