AN: I love them as dumb babies your honor, I swear. I just want them to be older so everything can go delightfully to shit and they can kiss in ways that are a lot less... uh... chaste?
006: goodnight, and goodbye.
Late February; 17 years.
It's much later than usual when Suzume finally decides – both very reluctantly and with immense relief – to make her way home.
Leaving her brother is something she never actually wants to do, and she feels that with a keen, almost agonizing intensity tonight. Yet she is also exhausted in a way she has never known before, overwhelmed with a heaviness set so deep in her bones that she wonders how she can even lift her feet at all.
Her brother, of course, notices.
(He always notices everything.)
"Want me to carry you out of the park?"
Not once has he ever offered to even walk her out of the park, she realizes, let alone this. Every night for the past however many months they have met, Suzume has left him in the thickening night and made her way home, alone.
"Is it… okay?"
They are standing now, only a little bit apart, and she looks up at him, and he looks down at her. The light is such that she can barely make out the features of his face, but even so, she can see the way his mouth quirks up in an approximation of a smile.
"Think I'd offer if it wasn't?" He asks her, wryly, and holds out his arms.
Like a moth to a flame, she surges into her brother's outstretched hands, her heart a bird behind the cage of her ribs, wings beating frantic and wild. Dabi, she thinks to herself, and those wings are beating so hard now she worries he might feel it as his hands claim her waist, lifting her up from the ground.
And now Suzume feels heavy, and yet absolutely weightless, and somehow distant from herself. Her arms wrap around his neck and she rests her head against his, unsure if she fully likes this weighted-floaty sensation.
"I don't want you to go," she whispers, and despite the contrarian desire to also be home and blessedly alone, Suzume means it. For some reason the thought of him being gone, in this moment – for this night, specifically – seems like too much to endure.
"Mmm." Dabi carries her as if she is as weightless as she feels, one arm secure around her legs and the other hooked across her back. "I'd take you with me if I could."
Briefly, she tries to imagine where that might be and comes up empty. It's not the first time Suzume has wondered where he goes when she leaves. Sometimes, she worries he is a ghost, somehow tied intrinsically to the park itself. She has never once seen him outside of it.
Somehow, that makes more sense than him actually going anywhere.
"Why can't you?"
It's a risky question, one she fully expects to be scolded for. He only chuckles, low and easy, and it makes her feel warm. Makes her feel lighter, a little more drifty. "Wanna come home with me that bad?"
The temptation to deny it is there – it feels daunting to admit her feelings out loud, and especially after tonight has already left her feeling so raw and frayed.
But with her head against the side of his, she's at least spared the probing, needling intensity of his eyes, and that makes it a little easier.
"Sometimes," she whispers.
She hears him exhale from his nose, and she thinks that might be a laugh, too. "Only sometimes?"
Sometimes, Suzume thinks, is right; just not for this. Wanting to be with him isn't a sometimes-thing: it's really an always-thing. She always wants to be wherever he is – wants to go wherever he goes, especially when he's gone.
But sometimes, Suzume finds she is terribly frightened by how much Dabi seems to know. She has the notion that everyone in her life has only known her in haphazard-bits and fragmented pieces, and no one person has ever had the same combination of shards.
The girl she is around her mother is different from the one she was around her father. The girl she is around her classmates may as well be a stranger compared to the girl she used to be with Katsuki, and to a lesser extent, Izuku.
Her brother, though, is different. It's as if every part of her is available to him, always. No matter how jagged and conflicting the piece – how shiny or ugly, how mismatched or misplaced – with seemingly no effort, he is able to reconstruct her into her complete and distinctly flawed self.
(And once reconstructed, she is as a clear pane of glass before him, every unraveling emotional nerve and guilt-ridden desire laid bare for him to see – whether she wants him to or not.)
So, Suzume doesn't answer him. She knows he knows, anyway.
(And because she knows he knows, Suzume also knows it's a deliberate kindness on his part when he doesn't bully her into giving him what he wants.)
To her continued surprise, Dabi does more than carry her out of the park.
He carries her all the way up to her apartment complex.
It's not like it's a long walk – her complex borders the park, after all – but there's something surreal and almost dreamlike about being with him out on the vacant streets for even these few stolen minutes. Suzume's neighborhood is relatively quiet already, but especially so at this late hour, and she thinks that must be why. While he's never admitted to such, Suzume has always had the lingering impression that he wants to be seen by as few people as possible, and maybe especially so with her.
That's something she tries hard not to think about – it always makes her feel terribly sad.
So, she thinks about something else instead:
There's the soap-sweat-ash smell of his hair, oddly comforting in its familiarity. Then, there's the heat of his chest, of his arms, seeping in even through the buffer of her heavy jacket – so impossibly warm she can't help but wonder if he's making it more intense on purpose.
And then she thinks about their shadow, pooling together on the walkway.
Their conjoined form makes a much longer shadow in the pale yellow streetlight than hers would on its own. Suzume finds herself so fascinated by the shape of their bodies cast together in black across the pavement that she almost doesn't hear him when he says: "Well, guess this is it."
Tightening her arms around him, she buries her face in his nice-smelling hair and shakes her head. It isn't that she doesn't want a reprieve – if anything, she really, really needs one. The day has been hard, and the park had been –
Intense.
A little scary?
And yet –
"I don't want you to go." It comes out muffled, barely audible. And then, just a little louder, "I wish you could stay all the time."
Her brother – no, Dabi, Dabi, Dabi, she thinks, feeling her cheeks warm – laughs quietly again. "All the time, huh? Not sometimes?"
There is never any escape, Suzume thinks, huffing with what little agitation she has the energy to muster. No escape, never – only the illusion that there might be. Her brother is nothing but traps, traps, and more traps.
"Don't be such a baby, Suzu," he says, but in that rare way of his that's warm all the way through, soft enough to take nearly all the fight out of her. Reluctantly, she untangles herself from him as he sets her down on her own two feet, though she's quick to lean into him after, face pressed into his stomach and arms hanging limp and defeated by her sides.
"Don't go," she whines into his shirt.
He smooths his hands over her hair, and the heat of his fingers over her scalp has her melting a little. "Your mom'll be home soon."
"So – so you can meet her – maybe she can adopt you, and you can be my real brother. And then you can stay, and then you won't ever have to go." It's a childish suggestion, Suzume knows, even by her standards…
But the thought of having to return to her apartment alone has her feeling more than a little desperate.
"Hard pass. Don't need a mom." His tone is light, but the softness is gone – and the warmth, too. His hands stir in her hair, and for a moment he's quiet.
And then, quieter still, he tells her: "I only want you."
And like it had in the park, that notion leaves Suzume feeling some very complicated type of way she can't exactly parse. It makes her feel good, she knows – so very, very good. Like there are butterflies inside of her, their wings like the brush of feather-light kisses, sweet and tickling.
But there's something else, too – something vaguely sour, something vaguely queasy.
Butterflies in a thick, syrupy fog.
Sinking down to her level, her brother balances on the balls of his feet and takes her hands in his own. They're so big, and they make her own look so small. They make her feel small. "Don't get sad again, Suzu. Try not to think about the parts of it that make you feel bad; just think hard about the parts of it that make you feel good," Dabi tells her, gently – tells her knowingly, because of course he knows how she's feeling.
Doesn't he always?
Her brother's eyes are less intense than they were in the park, but still so very blue behind the spill of his black bangs. Unbidden, she thinks about drowning, and shivers.
"And if you can't manage that all the time, it's okay if you're scared. It's okay if you need time to adapt to it. We'll do it together, okay?" His hands squeeze hers. "Just the two of us."
Suzume nods, more than a little anxious, but it feels so nice when he runs his thumbs over her own, rhythmic and steady. It makes her feel more tired than she already is. It makes her feel so sleepy.
She imagines him in her apartment, in her room, tucking her into bed the way her mother used to be able to do before they'd left her father's house. They'd trade kisses, and good night wishes, and Suzume always went to bed feeling all the better for it.
Now, her mother often comes home well after she's put herself to bed.
So, she imagines him doing it, instead.
"Can I – " Suzume starts, and then immediately clamps her mouth down around the impulsive question, mortified.
"Can you what?" Now, her older brother's eyes aren't a deep lake. Now they are an azure hued flame in the dark, much-too-much, and when she tries to look away from him, he has her by the chin again.
Gently, this time.
(A concession Suzume is more than thankful for after the biting grip he'd had on her in the park.)
Gentle or not, Suzume knows him well enough by now to know he won't accept a direct 'no', let alone a wishy-washy misdirection. So, taking a deep breath, she closes her eyes and exhales the words in a frenetic rush. "CanIkissyougoodnight!"
There's a heartbeat or three of silence – but how long is that really when her heart is going so fast, so fast and so hard in her chest that she worries she might actually die?
(One or three actual eternities – )
Then the silence is over, and there's the sound of his laughter, hushed but no less genuine. Suzume can feel it on her face, too – feel the heat of his breath all over her cheeks and her nose and her closed eyes, leaving the fire she knows he has inside of him simmering and hot under her own skin.
"Look at you," Dabi whispers, and she feels him let go of her chin – feels him tuck a strand of her hair behind her ear, instead. "Trying so hard to be brave. Too bad your red cheeks give it away."
"It's cold." She can't bear to look at him. It comes out a petulant whine from behind closed eyes.
And then, immediately, she's full of regret.
Of course it's too late to do anything about her misstep. The hand along the line of her jaw creeps up spider-quick, and she knows what he's doing, and she tries to pull away – but between her closed eyes and his dexterity, he's just too fast for her.
And even when she's expecting it, the pinch has her eyes open and watering, stinging fresh in the cold night air.
Suzume wants to cry out. Wants to so much – in surprise, in pain, in indignation, all of it. But even with the cry simmering incensed and hot in her throat, she's mindful enough of him and their close proximity to the apartments to not make a sound.
Because her brother doesn't want anyone to know, right?
She wonders if he appreciates just how hard it is.
Dabi's grin is cat-lazy with just a hint of teeth, white and shiny even in the dark. "No sense lying to me about why your cheeks are hot when I can give you a real reason to hide behind." He pats her other un-pinched cheek, a kindness and a threat. It's only through a tightly clenched jaw that she manages not to flinch. "You coulda just asked, y'know."
"Don't wanna ask you anything," she mumbles, glumly, choosing to glower down at the ground instead of closing her eyes. "You're so mean."
She hears him click his tongue behind his teeth, a soft tsk-tsk-tsk. "Don't be like that," Dabi says, reasonably – as if he were being perfectly reasonable. "It's only 'cause you're so cute – I just can't help myself. That's not my fault, is it?"
And that sounds absolutely unreasonable to her. For all his patient explanations over the last few months, it just isn't something Suzume can understand. She has never wanted to be mean to anything cute in her whole life.
Inside of her, though, there are suddenly more butterflies than there is that slick, squeamish haze. It's not fair, she thinks, flustered and a little bitter – not fair that he can call her 'cute' for an easy win.
Not fair that something so small can undo the tight-stiched seams of her anger in an instant.
"I don't know," she says, a little unsure and a little more red-in-the-face. And then, because she wants so much to appease him: "I guess not."
"You'll understand one day." Dabi sounds so confident, but Suzume is especially unsure about that.
There's no sense asking for clarification, though, and she's certainly not bold enough to try to argue with him right now – so she just bobs her head up and down in loose agreement.
She's just so tired.
As if on cue, a yawn works its way through her, so intense she can feel it unfurl almost painfully in her face and her chest both.
"That beat, huh?"
Another nod, graceless and clumsy. She's too exhausted to really care. "Wanna go to bed."
"And you will," Dabi says, still confident. "But not before you gimme what I want, first."
Sliding her gaze back up from the pavement, she meets his again, finally – curious despite herself. "What you want?"
"Forget already?" He presses two long fingers to her mouth, and even if it isn't a pinch, Suzume feels like the intention is the same. "I want my goodnight kiss."
"That was what I wanted, though, not you – " The argument she's making isn't one she can even properly parse in her own head, but she's suddenly so terribly shy it's hard to follow through on any real line of thought.
It's one thing to ask her brother if she can give him a kiss –
Somehow, though, it's another thing entirely for him to ask her for one.
"So?" Dabi shrugs easy, always so unfazed even when she feels like she's falling apart. "You wanted it, didn't you? Went and put it in my head, so now you gotta take responsibility. How's a big brother supposed to get to sleep without a goodnight kiss, huh?"
And there are more butterflies inside of her now, and more of that awful fog, too. Suzume finds she's holding her breath behind a tight closed mouth because she's terrified that if she opens it everything – all of it – will just spill out.
Just a jumble of sticky rainbow wings in a mess of acid sick.
It's so much, sometimes – sometimes, he's just so much, just too much. And she thinks she wants to cry, and she wants to laugh, and she wants to push herself against him and feel his arms around her, and she wants to run away. The heat in her cheeks – and in her ears, and in her throat, that heat that fills her up, completely – is so hot she's afraid it might actually burn.
And somehow he's just so cool and composed even though he's the one with the actual fire within him, burning so hot it consumes him from the inside out.
She wants to tell him it's not fair. Wants to tell her fire-hot-but-still-so-cool older brother that he's not fair, that he's never fair, that nothing is fair. Wants to beg him to be fair, just once. Please – please –
But there's something in her that loves the insistent demand in his blazing eyes, even if it terrifies her.
It means he likes her, doesn't it?
And even if he doesn't like her the way she wants him to – the way she's come to realize she likes him, so desperate and raw in a way it never was with Katsuki –
It's enough, she thinks.
If this is the shape his want takes, well, then it's enough to be wanted by him at all.
So, she puts her hands on his shoulders, a little unsteady and a lot unsure, and lets out the breath she was holding to take in another. It's deep, and shaky, and it gives her a bit of a headrush.
(The way he goes indistinct like a messy watercolor painting as her vision blurs is almost a mercy.)
It shouldn't be such a big thing, she reasons, tilting her head and pressing her lips to his cheek right along the scar that carves its way from his mouth to his ear. She's kissed her mother so many times before, in much the same way. It's just a goodnight kiss.
Just a goodnight kiss.
But his skin beneath her mouth is so much hotter than even her flushed face, so hot it's hard to keep from flinching away. This is where the fire is, she thinks; where it leaks out and eats him up, no matter how many times she touches him and tries to put him back together.
And that just makes her so sad. Not angry. Not scared.
Just sad.
So, Suzume kisses him again, and again, and one time more –
And then he's got his arms around her, crushing her so tightly against himself that her cheek slides along his, angled so that she can't kiss him anymore.
"M'sorry, Nii-chan," she whispers, her mouth against his ear."Sorry it was bad. I just want – I just want you to have a good night, and I… I want you to be okay."
"No," Dabi says, finally, after a long, long moment. Suzume thinks he sounds a little hoarse. Husky, almost. "No, it was fine. It was good. You did good."
When he takes her by the shoulders and pushes her away from himself, it's with a gentle and trembling pair of hands that is wholly unlike him. "You're always good," he whispers. "Too good, sometimes."
The apartment lights are at his back, his hair in his face. She can see his mouth clear enough, curved up in a smile – but she lifts her hands, anyway. Like a blind girl, she traces his cheeks with hesitant fingertips, movements slow and careful until they brush feather-light beneath his eyes.
Dry.
So why does he sound like he might be crying?
He smiles wider at the small, anguished frown that creases her features and leans his head into her hand, pressing a kiss to the inside of her palm. "You're the crybaby," he tells her, mouth moving warm against her skin. "Not me."
"You sound sad." Sad with that realization herself, Suzume tries to do for him what he did for her earlier in the night, smoothing her fingers over the planes of his face. Her fingers follow the line of his nose, brush clumsy over the caterpillar fuzz of his eyebrows.
The expectation that he'll stop her is there, but she's surprised when it's something that never becomes a reality. Her brother simply lets her touch him, strangely passive under the press of her fingers – watching her, as ever, with half-lidded eyes.
He knows everything about her, she thinks, and she understands so little about him. So little, so little – so little that it's genuinely a relief when he finally takes her hands in his own, holding them against his cheeks, and says, "Nah. Not sad."
It's a relief, she realizes, because she knows he's lying. And that's something. It's something.
(Hadn't he promised he'd teach her, so long ago?)
And then, he pulls her hands down and leans forward, planting a lingering kiss against her forehead through the fringe of her hair.
"Goodnight, Suzu."
When he rises to his full height and takes a step back from her, Suzume mourns the loss of his body heat. When he drops her hands from his own, she wants to cry over their severed physical connection.
Looking away from him, she fixes her gaze on the ground instead, willing back new tears. Their shadows on the ground now are two separate things, even though the space between them is small and hardly there at all –
But she swears she can feel that space inside of herself, cleaving her straight through the middle.
"Goodnight." It's all she can manage, and she closes her eyes when she feels his hand ruffle its way through her hair –
Keeps them closed when she feels him take it back.
And when she opens her eyes, he is gone, and she is alone.
Suzume lets herself into her silent apartment with her key, and she's alone there, too.
The entryway is dark and cold as she shuffles sluggishly out of her things, forcing herself to put her coat on the hook and her shoes in the cupboard even though she wants to leave everything in a petulant heap by the door.
Down the small hall, though, and just through the door that leads from it into the minimal living area, it's not dark. Light seeps from around the edges of the half-open door, casting stark, hard-edged shadows all over the corridor.
Suzume looks down at the clock her mother keeps on the shoe cabinet: a plastic fat cat that reads out the time in back-lit green neon numbers, presented cheerfully on a sign it holds between outstretched paws.
(It's too early for her mother to be home, Suzume realizes – too early by almost thirty minutes.)
Something catches in her throat – a sticky, prickling feeling of wrongness. Eyes darting from the cat, she looks back up at the coat hooks, and –
Her mother's coat isn't there.
She swallows, and that feeling is in her stomach now, blooming hot and sick like algae in a fetid swamp. Taking a step back, she reaches out blindly for the doorknob –
And then, the door to the living room slides fully open.
The form that emerges into the frame of the doorway – gilded an ironic gold by the small table lamp within the room behind it – is tall and lean and broad shouldered –
And familiar to Suzume in all the worst ways.
She wants to ask him what he's doing here. She wants to scream. She wants to throw up.
Instead, she turns on her heel and her grasping hand finds the doorknob.
Frantically, she turns it, pushing it outward to stumble shoeless into the landing. She will scream. She'll call for her brother, and he'll come, she tells herself –
Prays, hopes.
He'll come when she cries out for him, because it's supposed to be the two of them, isn't it? Her midnight fire-eyed specter of a brother will hear her, and –
But like a nightmare, everything feels slow and sluggish, like moving through mud – everything except the man in the living room doorway. He's behind her in a second. He's always been so fast.
And suddenly he has her by the hair, and then by the shoulder, and then his hand is over her mouth. "None of that." It comes out a quiet, agitated hiss. "Your neighbors are sleeping; don't burden them with this."
And of course he'd say that, Suzume thinks, wild-eyed with a roiling kind of terror – of course her father would be concerned about that. He's always been so preoccupied with what everyone thinks. The news; his fans – rankings, rankings, and even more rankings.
(Just never concerned about the people who should matter most.)
Suzume doesn't care about him or her neighbors though, and she thrashes, violent and frantic, in his arms. When she realizes she can't make any real headway – he's so much bigger than her, after all – she struggles vainly to get her teeth into the press of his heavy hand. Anything.
Anything.
Nothing is all she gets.
"Cut it out," he says lowly, furious in that horrifyingly understated manner she wishes she could forget. The rough way his fingers bite into her cheeks has her terrified he might actually crack her jaw, it hurts so much. "Out so late, acting like you're feral – Kozue wanted a kid so badly, but she can't even mother right. You're an ungrateful mess."
Suzume has seen her father be this way with her mother before, but has never been on the receiving end herself. When she'd been younger, a part of her had resented her mother for surrendering every battle – abandoning every single well-justified fight with a bowed head and hands folded passive in her lap. "I'm sorry," her mother had always said. "I'm sorry, Akihiko."
A white flag, those hands of her mother's, her averted eyes.
The coward's way out.
Now, as Suzume's own struggling stills out of a desperate desire for self-preservation, she finds she finally – regretfully – understands her mother. "I'm sorry," she tries to say against her father's hand, dizzy with the agony of his unrelenting grip. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry!"
That white flag is a heavy, awful burden, but not as heavy as Suzume's guilt.
Mama, she thinks – Mama, I'm sorry – I didn't know. I'm sorry –
I'm sorry, I didn't know.
AN2: I feel like I'm in this weird place where I feel bad if the chapters are too long (the last one was almost 10k) and also I feel dumb if they're short (this one was like 4.5k?). I'm just so used to having a lot of shit to ramble about, but things start to actually HAPPEN in this chapter so I think the next chapter or two are going to be shorter things with more action until I can get back to my longer emotional and dialogue-heavy relationship building scenes (read: self-indulgent as fuuuuck).
I also went back and changed the chapter names. Initially they had lyrics from songs I was listening to while I wrote (or things that fit the vibe) but I've given them actual chapter names that better reference what went on in the chapter for my own convenience when I go back!